2013 Charleston Conference

The Carolina Consortium enables academic libraries in North and South Carolina to use their bulk purchasing power to obtain favorable pricing on a variety of electronic resources. In 2013 the Carolina Consortium (CC) included roughly 150 community colleges, public universities, and private institutions of higher learning. Started at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG), the CC has no formal structure and requires no membership fees. Librarians at UNCG handle the majority of negotiations with publishers and vendors and serve as a resource for libraries throughout the Carolinas. Through the consortium, members realize a collective cost avoidance of approximately 240 million dollars each year.
Despite these significant savings, we believe it is imperative to assess our deals for our members. For the past two years, we have collected cost-per-use statistics on several big journal packages for institutions in the CC with an aim of better understanding the value institutions derive from these deals and to evaluate how well these deals serve the many different types of colleges and universities within the consortium. UNCG and several other CC members have used this cost-per-use data as a metric for determining whether to cancel or renew big deals. In this presentation, we will discuss trends we uncovered through our CPU analysis. We also explore what is behind the numbers and how our members balanced the CPU data with other factors in their decision making.
In discussion, we hope to gather information from the attendees about their own CPU data. Through this presentation, attendees will be able to place their usage statistics in a broader context and will take away tools for evaluating the value of their Big Deal packages.