Electronic or paper journals? Budgetary, collection development, and user satisfaction questions

Abstract

The escalating price of the rapidly growing number of electronic journals, databases, indexes, and books, along with traditionally published print subscriptions and monographs, will soon force library administrators and collection development officers to make decisions between electronic or print products in the new millennium. The increasing costs of the dual format subscriptions or indexes are unfeasible and perhaps even unnecessary from the users’ point of view in the disciplines of political science and economics. The researcher compared the annual subscription prices and the percentage increases of the 203 core printed journals with their electronic counterparts in the disciplines of political science and economics during the 1998‐2000 academic years. The complete list of electronically available titles was identified and priced, then titles costing greater than $500 were separated. The electronic use statistics were examined for the expensive serials, based upon the numbers of hits cumulated by users’ requests via the Web sites of the Texas A&M University Libraries. After the pricing information and use statistics for both electronic and printed resources were produced, the researcher had a clear answer to the electronic and paper dilemma.