1. Slaying the Dragon with the Long Tail: University of Memphis Libraries’ decision to break the Big Deal with Elsevier
Steven A. Knowlton, formerly Collection Development Librarian at University of Memphis (now Librarian for History and African American Studies, Princeton University)
[assisted by James R. Rodgers and Matthew J. Jabaily]
ASERL Webinar, October 25, 2016

2. Flat budget – rising subscription costs

3. THE “BIG DEAL” TBR-wide agreement:
UofM maintains 288 subs (other libraries maintain 2005 title list)
Discount from “list price”
Discounted “content fee”
Must maintain amount of spending – allowed to swap titles on subscription list
Multi-year contract with other Tennessee Board of Regents universities
Pay an additional fee equivalent to 10% of entire expenditure
Enjoy access to most other titles published by the publisher (around 2800 titles)

4. THE “LONG TAIL”
Anderson (2004): A few titles will have most of the use. The rest of the titles will exhibit smaller amounts of use.
This parallels other phenomena
such as a Bradford distribution
and the Pareto principle
(80/20 rule).
The Freedom Collection has
a very long tail.

5. THE “LONG TAIL”
DOWNLOADS
NUMBER OF TITLES

6. USAGE BY YEAR-OF-PUBLICATION

7. ADJUSTED COST-PER-USE
Traditional Cost-per-Use:
Subscription Price divided by all uses
Adjusted Cost-per-Use:
Subscription Price divided by just those uses not available through perpetual access or other mean (Open Access, aggregated databases)

8. TRADITIONAL VS. ADJUSTED COST-PER-USE
TITLE
2014 Price
All Use
Paid Use
CPU
ACPU   
Proc of Douglas Prasher Institute
$3,436.44
227
$15.14
$3,436.44!
Coprolite Technology
$3,343.23 13 1
$257.17
Journal of Cadaver Nursing
$2,288.96 70 19
$32.70
Dorsal Fin Grooming & Care
$2,376.28 17
$139.78
Quarterly Review of Annual Reviews
$1,669.06 12 2
$139.09
$834.53
Int Journal of Forced Ranking
$5,252.93 49 11
$107.20
$477.54
Malacological Sociology
$1,772.64 22 5
$80.57
$354.53
Mean of 32 Journals
$3,460.22
69.2
32.2
$764.74
$1,628.44
Median of 32 Journals
$2,974.89 7
$500.16

9. HOW THIS INFORMATION HELPS
We settled on a number we are willing to pay
Used the adjusted cost-per-use figures to identify the titles with the best value
Note: a lot of the highest-use titles fell out of the list, because so much of the use was from older content
Added up the highest-ranked titles until we hit our target number

10. 2800
2800
NUMBER OF TITLES

11. FULL-TEXT DOWNLOADS
FULL-TEXT DOWNLOADS

13. FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS
The usage available through perpetual access will decline as the last year of P.A. recedes
Will need to revisit the title list every couple years to ensure maximum content availability
Possible increase in ILL costs