Description of Process and Cancellations

The impact of inflation on content costs, continued flat budgets, and a potential reduction to the collection acquisition base budget requires the Libraries to plan for cuts to our collections. The cuts do not impact the Law Library or the School of Medicine Library. Potential cuts will incorporate a variety of strategies including making cuts to print and electronic monograph purchases, print and electronic journals, and online databases. Find more information about the Libraries’ collection budget needs.

Journal and database review

After receiving all surveys, the Libraries’ Collections Committee will review and analyze campus feedback, along with other information including:

  • The three-year price history of the resource including inflation increases.
  • Three-year analysis of the usage of the resource. 
  • Citation behavior (for disciplines that have sufficient information) over a three-year period. The citation measurement applies only to journals. The Libraries can gather information on the number of times the University of Nevada, Las Vegas authors have not only cited a journal, but how often they have published an article in a journal.
  • Is a journal indexed and available full-text in an online database?
  • Is an alternative version of a resource available for free, via open access, in an institutional repository or other method?
  • Ability to quickly and cost-effectively obtain an item through Document Delivery or other method.
  • Does the journal (publisher) provide reasonable mechanisms and costs for open access in line with disciplinary norms?

Distribution of collection cuts

From a discipline standpoint, the collection cuts will reflect the percentage of budget allocation and cost of resources. These cuts will be distributed across monographs, journals, and databases taking into account the disciplinary importance of each resource type:

  • 50% from sciences and engineering
  • 30% from social sciences
  • 20% from arts and humanities