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Journal/Database Review Project: Why Do We Need to Cut?

This guide provides information on the 2015 Journal/Database Review Project undertaken by the SU Libraries.

Reasons We Need to Cut Spending

  1. Our budget hasn’t kept up with our database and journals spending, given the growing demand for resources and especially journal price inflation, which has been averaging roughly 7% in recent years, well above the Consumer Price Index and the Higher Education Price Index.  See the Journal Inflation graph to the right.
  2. We had been paying for some databases out of a reserve fund that we had built up over the years, but that reserve fund is now gone.
  3. We cannot make up the difference by cutting spending in other areas—collections, primarily journals and databases, make up the majority of our non-personnel expenses.  We already have drastically cut expenses in other areas in recent years, as we have tried to keep up with journals and databases.  See the Library Non-personnel Spending graph to the right.

Journal Inflation

This graph shows how the actual prices of journals increased from 1994 to 2014 at a rate far above inflation, whether measured by the Consumer Price Index or the Higher Education Price Index.

Library Non-personnel Spending, 2006-2014

This graph shows how collections--especially journals and databases--have grown to be by far the biggest expenses and other spending has declined.