Collections Management
Libraries’ budgets simply cannot keep pace with both the escalating costs of electronic resources and the expanding medical and scientific knowledgebase. Add requests for APC support to the mix, and the financial tenability of addressing each of these demands is daunting. Until there’s some stability in the scholarly communications landscape, health sciences libraries are going to continue to wrestle with challenging collection management and development decisions.
Although this has come back to bite me, I prefer to start from the position of saying yes – “Yes, we can get that for you” – until and unless we run into a hard reason to say no if it’s simply outside the scope of our collection development policy. And even then, we try to come up with alternatives to get us to a yes or to at least point the requestor in the right direction.
John Gallagher, MLS
bit.ly/doody-gallagher
Jeffery R. Ring, PhD, MILS
bit.ly/bmj-ring
We always use usage statistics when considering what to renew. We have a solid program on plastic surgery, but the department is pretty small. So I cannot expect to have huge usage because of that; but as long as there’s usage, I take that into consideration.
Hector R. Perez-Gilbe, MLIS, MPH, AHIP
bit.ly/bmj-perez-gilbe
16
Powered by FlippingBook