The Future of Academic Library Materials Expenditures: A Thought Experiment

Abstract

This working paper is a thought experiment that looks at recent changes in the academic library environment, particularly: 1. Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) for books, both print and e-books, works and can provide the books that are need at a lower cost than traditional approaches to collection building. 2. Article purchasing rather than subscriptions for journals can be cost effective in many cases. 3. Gold Open Access (OA) journals will continue to grow and become the business model of choice for a large portion of scholarly journal publishing. As a result libraries will be able to decrease the number of subscriptions they need. 4. The growth in open content and open discovery tools on the Web, such as Wikipedia and Google Scholar, will reduce the need for paid database content. Strategies that take advantage of these changes can be used to adjust the expenditures required to provide content to library users in ways that could lead to a significant reduction in the increase in library materials budgets, and may in fact make it possible to get through the next decade with little or no real dollar increase in materials budgets.