Colorado State University faced with budget cuts, has canceled its subscriptions to Playboy and 971 other journals for the 2004-05 school year.
A few other titles that won’t be found on the shelves next year include Car and Driver, Consumer Reports, Ebony, The New Yorker, Redbook, Vanity Fair and Vogue.
Morgan Library has 8,000 journal and magazine subscriptions, said Julie Wessling, the library’s assistant dean of public services.
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“Unfortunately, I think this is going to be an ongoing problem that we are going to have to deal with,” she said. “Sadly there is no way around the fact that this is going to be an incredible challenge for a university that needs access to research materials.”
Somehow, those are not what I would have pulled
Not really knowing the demographics of the college, and it being an academic library, this may be a bit off, but those are not the titles I would have pulled. I suppose if it came down to say, Car and Driver and JAMA, I’d choose Car and Driver, but I don’t know as that was the situation. It seems they cut cheaper subscriptions (just from the article) that are fairly useful.
At any rate, if we cancelled Consumer Reports, Vogue, and The New Yorker at our library (public) there would be rioting in the streets.
They have to cut the little ones.
For political reasons they probbaly had to cut some of those titles. When they cut one of their big journals that cost several thousand a year and the professor from that department comes over to complain they don’t want to hear, “Why did you cut the Journal of Particle Physics but seem to have the money for Playboy and Car and Driver.” The answer is because those other pbulications cost about $25/yr and the physics journal cost $10,000, but explaining that to a ticked professor is something you don’t want to do.
Another approach
Simply cutting down by cancelling will probably not make the greatest impression on publishers with a high rate profile.
As the library get closer to an indispensable core collection, the publisher can actually raise the prices knowing that this time there is no more cutting to be done.
I would not cancel cost-effective popular magazines, but substitute a few very expensive ones with cheaper alternatives. This would make the desired impact on the publishers.
You CAN buy gold too dearly.