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On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, E.P. Goldfinch wrote: > Since everyone seems to have a view on this one, it would be very > interesting to me, as a publisher, to know whether the packages being > purchased, containing both wanted and unwanted titles, are actually cheaper > than buying only the wanted titles individually. If so, that would somewhat > weaken the cause for complaint. Packages such as ScienceDirect and IDEAL of course contain both wanted and unwanted titles for most libraries. Deciding which titles are wanted or unwanted is not that easy, however. We compared the list of titles to which we did not subscribe in print and the additional cost of gaining access to those titles through cross-access and decided to subscribe to the Elsevier ScienceDirect package but not to the IDEAL package. We placed instead individual new orders which we had been holding back for titles in the IDEAL package. So you could say we decided to buy only the "wanted" titles individually rather than purchasing the whole package. I was surprised when I first saw our ScienceDirect usage statistics because the majority of the most popular titles (based on full-text downloads) were titles which we had never subscribed to or which we had cancelled in the past. We were still receiving current issues of certain titles in print at the time which might have affected the usage. One year later 17 out of the top 30 titles are those which we had in print until the end of 2001. Six had been cancelled between 1981 and 1996 mostly for financial reasons. The other seven were never subscribed to by this library. In a multi-disciplinary library it is not easy to guess which are "wanted" or "unwanted" titles in a multi-disciplinary package. One thing seems clear. The titles we subscribed to in print until the end of last year were not necessarily the titles that were "wanted" most. Mieko ----- Mieko Yamaguchi [log in to unmask] Technical Services Manager/System Coordinator +44 (0)1248 382970 Main Library, University of Wales Bangor, UK +44 (0)1248 382979 (Fax)