IUG 2007 – Annual Serials Renewals Made Easy

Jane Theissen of Fontbonne University (yeah, THAT Fontbonne!) made this presentation.

Jane walked us through the steps she takes to involve faculty in the annual serials renewal process. They also have Ebsco Subscription Services as their subscription agent. She creates a review file of current subscriptions in Millennium and then adds usage data and current price to it in a spreadsheet. Then she estimates price increases using Ebsco’s Historical Price Analysis Report. The spreadsheet is sorted by fund code (academic department) and distributed to each academic department for changes, approval, etc.

Fontbonne has about 300 subscriptions and this is a fairly simplistic formula but I think that it could be a place to start a comprehensive review. Also, they do this during the spring semester (before receiving the official renewal list from Ebsco.

She noted that one disadvantage of her current process is that although the changes they recommend are made in May, they don’t take effect until the following January (when most journals begin new volumes and thus new subscriptions).

In response to a question from the audience, she told us that they don’t have any individual subscriptions for e-journals only, they receive all of their individual subscriptions in print (unless they are included in an electronic aggregation).

Another audience member mentioned that he had learned from Ebsco that sometimes they actually end a library’s subscription and begin a new one and that results in the library receiving duplicate issues.