Re: E-Journal admin costs

[Carol Hansen Montgomery <montgoch@drexel.edu>]

On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, Rollo Turner wrote:

> Counting the cost of e-journal admin
>
> Has anyone out there stopped to measure the costs of administering
> e-journals? By this I mean the cost of subscription management and
> access provision. It seems to me that as the process of acquiring
> journals changes a great deal of simplicity is being lost with
> consequent and often quite substantial impacts on cost.

I have a grant from the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services to
do just this.  I have been collecting staff time spent on "traditional"
and electronic journal-related activites for about a year and a half.
The analysis will be completed this Summer.  The project web site is at:
http://www.library.drexel.edu/facts/imls/default.html.  You can find an
overview in my article: "Measuring the Impact of an Electronic Journal
Collection on Library Costs: A Framework and Preliminary Observations."
D-Lib Magazine 6:10 (October 2000).
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/montgomery/10montgomery.html.

Basically, I believe that the costs you mention are substantial.  We found
about four years ago that using our agent actually complicted the process
and consequently switched to a direct purchase model for the large
packages.

Carol Hansen Montgomery
Dean of Libraries
Drexel University