Das neue Etatmodell der UB Kassel

Nutzungsbasiertes Portfoliomanagement für E-Journals und Datenbanken

Abstract

In 2019, the university library of Kassel introduced a new budget allocation model in order to make efficient use of stagnating funds and to cope with rising costs. Allocation of budgets for monographs remains subject-specific, depending on current numbers of professors and students as well as on average book prices. E-journals and databases, however, are now paid from a central overall budget. Only e-resources with a favourable relation of cost per usage are kept in the library’s portfolio. Expensive and poorly used products are cancelled in order to compensate for price increases and to enable new subscriptions of journals and databases based on the needs of the faculties. The university library uses SemperTool's Electronic Resource Management System RMS for its portfolio management. All available usage statistics of electronic resources are regularly collected, either automatically via SUSHI or by uploading COUNTER reports. In some cases, the latter must be created manually based on proprietary formats provided by the publishers. Only a few publishers do not provide any statistics at all. In these cases, the university library has to fall back on statistics from the local HAN server. RMS provides a cost per usage report containing all products. The report can be further processed with spreadsheet software like Excel. The maximum accepted cost per usage is adapted annually based on the requirements to keep spending at a reasonable level and to enable new subscriptions according to the faculties’ requests. All products which exceed the current threshold are cancelled.