Questions regarding libraries' use of Unsub

[Jessica Harris]

Hello,

My name is Jessica Harris and I’m the Electronic Resources Management Librarian at the University of Chicago. We recently started using Unsub to help evaluate our ScienceDirect subscription and are interested in learning how other libraries are setting their parameters and including additional data to make their decisions. If you could answer one or more of the following questions, we would greatly appreciate it:

 

Is your library…

• …including ResearchGate content in your assessment? Why or why not?
• …including non peer-reviewed versions?
• …keeping the default $17 ILL cost and 5% ILL frequency rate?
• …reviewing journal availability in aggregator databases as part of the assessment? If so, how are you combining this data with Unsub?

 

Thank you very much for your help with this.

 

Jessica Harris

Electronic Resources Management Librarian

The University of Chicago Library

773-702-0228

ja...@uchicago.edu

 

[Debbie Hathaway]

I am just getting started with Unsub so can't answer all your questions right now. However, I asked my ILL what the average price paid was and I changed the default to $14.00.

Hope this helps.

Debbie

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Debbie Hathaway, MLS

Acquisitions & Collection Development Librarian

University of Dallas, Cowan-Blakley Memorial Library
1845 E. Northgate Drive
Irving, TX 75062
972-721-4122
dha...@udallas.edu

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[Deborah Rollins]

I am currently working on one of our publisher lists. Initially I left all of the pre-sets in Unsub as is, but see below #9. Here are the steps I've taken so far:

1. In Unsub, ranked by CPU and set instant fill rate at 75%. This gives a base set of 80 "selected" subscriptions shaded blue. The 75% is an admitted arbitrary set point, but since it appears to give a certain level of critical savings against our huge budget cuts, seemed like a good place to start.
2. Exported to Excel, and shaded the 80 starter titles in blue on export sheet.

3.  Sorted export sheet by OA %. Flagged selected high (50%+) OA access titles for further review (aggregator db availability and embargo periods; YOP latest 5yrs review).
4. Sorted export sheet by Usage. Usage metric incorporates downloads, our authors' citations to it, and our author's publications in it. Flagged high usage titles (down to 120/year) that did not get selected for further review (same).
5. Sorted by CPU rank, and secondarily by Usage. This brings out lower use titles from original selection set  we could perhaps do without.
6. Flagged low CPUs under $30 with low OA accesses. Possible adds to subs.
7. Look up coverage of remaining uninvestigated blue selected titles to eliminate any sufficiently covered in aggregators based on usage during embargo period.

8.   Sort by actual download-only data field and review. I found a number of titles had fairly low actual downloads, that received a high usage rank due to our authors' citations to the journal, or our author's publication within it. To me it seemed that in some, but not all, cases, the weighting of local author data skewed the importance too far toward selection.

I am just winging it here, and am probably undoing or duplicating work that is already represented by the straight data, but so far it seems like adding in aggregator and embargo data, as well as year-of-pub COUNTER data in conjunction with embargo periods, is a necessary step. Out of the initial selection of 80 based on CPU rank, I will DE-select 25 and possibly also ditch another 10 or more. The other steps also indicated titles we should add that were not in the initial group. So once again a huge messy spreadsheet with lots of notes, for final decision making. 

The one aspect of the Unsub data I don't fully understand is ILL costs listed on the title display when it has been selected, but will go back and review the video or ask later if it seems critical.

Deb