Cancellation and Replacement Review Timeframes
In the digital environment, electronic content and services provided to access electronic content are constantly evolving and changing. What seems appropriate now is not as relevant two to five years later. This is especially true regarding service provision to access electronic resources. This is an area where the market is still extremely volatile and where new services and tools come to market every three to six months. After reviewing the content collection or the service provider, it may be determined that it is time to cancel access to this content due to low usage, cuts to budgets, or because something else has become more significant and important to your institution. It may be that a provider has made a significant platform change and the new platform does not allow you to provide access to content and functionality as seamlessly as you were able to do so previously. Another change may be that significant content is no longer available through an aggregator supplier. In addition, the amount of open access content available continues to grow both from national governments and through ever-growing digital repositories.
If you are buying resources through a consortium, you may need to consider the factors of the greater consortia in making your decision to cancel and replace resources as it may not be possible in any given year to cancel and replace consortia-purchased resources. The consortia may elect to move away from specific resource deals which may make purchasing too expensive for your institution alone. Electronic resource managers should establish a review planning schedule for determining relevance and retention of electronic resource content and services every three to five years to insure purchases are still fulfilling the needs of their home institution. More than likely this review will be scheduled to coincide with the renewal or contract expiration of a given resource. For standard serial subscriptions, the review is often undertaken every year.(1)
Consultation with Stakeholders
Content and services in most libraries are not purchased in a vacuum but often can be retained in one. They are purchased because there was a demand either from faculty and students or from other members of your organization for the services being offered. In some cases, the content or service may be available on more than one platform or through more than one interface. Part of the evaluation in the Ongoing Evaluation and Access Section and the Annual Review Section should be to look at how resources are being used and if they’re still filling the purposes for which they purchased. After the review of usage and content provision has occurred, share the results of the review with all interested parties for a retention decision. The sharing can be as broad as posting cancellation lists to a library’s web pages for faculty and student input or a coordination of cancellation previews through library and campus department liaisons. (2) There may be a small but vocal minority who deem this content or service essential and it is important to understand all uses and aspects occurring of the resource in question. Be sure to include in the evaluation and consultation, your local content editors and the need to maintain resources due to ongoing scholarly input from your institution’s scholars.
If this is the case, it may be appropriate to meet with Deans of faculty in order to benefit from the wider view. If there is a 5% cut then something will have to go regardless of what different factions in the faculty say. Liaison with senior management in the faculty can help with these difficulties and puts the onus on the faculty themselves to make difficult decisions. Another avenue may be to negotiate for funding from other areas on campus that have a vested interest in the research production and creation at your institution.
Be sure to include any significant reports or usage issues from your trouble-shooting mechanism to show why use may have dropped off or if there has been a significant shift in the content being offered. For instance, an aggregator database may have re-negotiated terms of access for content and suddenly a library is experiencing an 18 month embargo period instead of a 12 month embargo period to content. This sort of information will be revealed through the trouble-shooting mechanisms in place as opposed to announcements from the content provider.
Be sure to share with the stakeholders what the post-cancellation rights will be for the content. Will your library retain the right to access the years previously purchased or not? Will perpetual access be made available through a third party site or be delivered on CD-ROM or hard drive to the library? If so, will there be an opportunity for the library to host the content locally? See if you can identify possible open access replacements for the content being lost and find out if you can retain any local scholarship in your institutional or digital repository.
Notify the Provider/Vendor
Once the decision has been to move away from a product or service, inform the vendor as soon as possible. Be honest and explain the evaluations undertaken and explain why the product is no longer meeting the demands of your institution. In the cases of moving a resource to another platform or provider, explain why the move is being made honestly. If the move is based on a much cheaper price quote, share a ballpark figure to allow the original provider the chance to counter offer. This information may result in more reasonable pricing on the original platform, and improvements or evolution of the product by the original vendor or provider. If the choice is to replace a given product with another one from the same provider, changing out products may result in a discount on what is to be purchased. Again, be very frank in explaining why one product may be more suitable for your library.
If in the end, the cancellation or replacement comes down solely to cost, make sure to let this be known as well. There still tends to be an idea that libraries do have a choice when it comes to what is purchased, but more and more, the decisions being made at a given library are what can be readily let go in order to preserve what is truly core or essential to a given institution. (3) Cost may be the deciding factor, but only for resources where content is not king.
Be sure to share with providers and vendors when subscription products are being paid for using one time funding mechanisms. This indicates to the provider that in the next year they are likely to lose business and the cancellation will come as less of a surprise.
Don’t burn any bridges! Many resources have post cancellation access, which means you need to keep up a working relationship with suppliers; this might also incur a platform access fee. Review the license to fully understand what your post-cancellation rights to access may be. In addition, you may re-subscribe to the resources in future years.
Notify Your Patron Base
Once the decision has been made to cancel and replace a resource, notify the patrons of the impending change to occur. Once the decision has been made to cancel and replace a resource, notify the patrons of the impending change to occur. This can be done as simply as adding a notation to the A-Z listing of resources for databases, or by annotating a holdings record in the OPAC to indicate the cancellation.
For large scale journal cancellations, it is always best to provide a cancellation list on the library’s web pages that alert the faculty and students about forthcoming cancellations. If possible do this at least one to two months in advance of the change occurring. Many electronic resource services allow for publicly displayed notes that can be presented to your patrons. Use this functionality to announce future changes and cancellations. If the cancellation is to be to a large collection or of a substantial nature, you may want to explain the changes via your libraries web presence or through newsletters or emails to your patron base if possible.
When notifying your patron base, make sure to offer alternatives where possible and to note any post cancellation access. Give your patrons enough notice in order for them to transfer any notes or saved searches from their personal profiles in the resources that are about to be cancelled. If possible, indicate alternative resources that may be available more readily on mobile devices and remotely from the library. One way to do this is to record quick instructional videos showing how readily alternative resources can be accessed on mobile devices or from other areas on campus.
Notate Your Records
In your ILS, accounting system, or electronic resource management system note the decision and mark each item for cancellation for each resource to insure that subsequent invoices are not paid erroneously. Also record the reasons for cancellation to refer to in the future as staff changes often result in the loss of this type of information. If you have been subscribing to the resources through a third party vendor or consortium, make sure the third party vendor/consortium contact is fully informed to all the resources to be cancelled.(3) Have a shared drive space or internal communication mechanism where cancellation spreadsheets or databases can be archived and retrieved for informational purposes.
You will need this evidence in future years as journals, in particular, have a nasty habit of sneaking back into the collection around the time of the big deal renewal. In some cases access reappears if the title transfers publishers or a different platform.
Be sure that your knowledge base management staff are also well aware of the titles being canceled so they can remove access appropriately or change holdings information as needed. It is a good idea, to review the access points for the cancellations made a few months post cancellation in order to insure that patrons are not being directed to content streams which are no longer available.
Sometimes you may cancel a resource several months in advance. If this is the case, remember to set up a reminder in your ERM system or on your calendar to remove access on your knowledge base on the date the subscription runs out. In the case of post cancellation access, you’ll need to check whether you need to change your holding information to ensure your users have up to date information and that your link resolver works efficiently.
Investigate Open Access Alternatives
There is a growing field of open access resources, digital humanities web sites, and information on freely available digital scholarship. There is also a growing body of hybrid journals where an institution may not have full access to a single journal title or even a journal issue but select articles from a title. The challenge for electronic resource librarians is how to best provide access to this content. The first challenge is finding ways to identify the content available from hybrid journals and then how to provide access through knowledge bases.
Sometimes, these resources are overlooked and not added to a library collection simply because they are freely available but then their exposure to potential users and researchers is diminished. Libraries can have and often do have influence on these materials staying readily available when they are cataloged and included for standard preservation through library crowd sourced preservation mechanisms like LOCKSS and CLOCKSS. (7)
Begin evaluation of replacement product
In coordination with subject librarians and collection management librarians, the electronic resource manager should also do a yearly check of the abstract and indexing resources to see if a more convenient or popular platform also offers access these resources or if full text versions have been developed. If so, then a decision may be made to continue a given database but on a different platform, and the process described in Investigating New Content for Purchase/Addition will guide the selection of a preferred platform.
References
- Castro, Jeannie, Getz, Kelli, and Linden, Nancy, Making the Impossible Possible.
- Emery, Jill and Walker, Dana, Anti-Acquisitions Librarians in the Era of Economic Downsizing.
- Thomas, Wm. Joseph. NASIGuide: A Beginner’s Guide to Working with Vendors
- Holloway, Trina, Cancellation Workflow, E-Resources Management Handbook (2009) January
- Bailey, Charles,Digital Scholarship Web Site
- Carassai, Mauro and Takehama, Digital Humanities Quarterly
- CLOCKSS
Other documents
- Workflow: Cancellation of an e-journal. Created by staff at Texas A&M University.
Go to other sections
- Investigating New Content for Purchase/Addition
- Acquiring New Content
- Implementation
- Ongoing Evaluation and Access
- Annual Review
- Cancellation and Replacement Review