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As digital libraries move from demonstration projects to the real world of working libraries, it is critical to assess and to document the impact of the shift. This paper reports the methodology and initial results of an Institute for Library and Information Studies (IMLS) funded research study of the operational and economic impact of an academic library's migration to an all-electronic journal collection. Drexel Library's entire print and electronic journal collections and associated staff are the test bed to study three key research questions: (1) What is the impact on library staffing needs? (2) How have library costs been reduced, increased and/or re-allocated? (3) What other library resources have been affected? We are using quantitative and qualitative methods to answer the research questions operationalized in the following tasks: (1) Measure the staff time, subscriptions costs and other costs related to each activity required to acquire and maintain print and electronic journals. (2) Compute the per-volume, per-title, and per-use costs of acquiring and maintaining print and electronic subscriptions. (3) Study all impacted library services, including changes in reference service, document delivery, and instructional programs. Initial results of measuring staff time indicate Information Services and Systems Operation departments constitute the majority of personnel costs for electronic journals. Technical Services and Circulation account for the majority of staff costs for print journals. Per title subscription costs appear to be substantially lower for electronic titles obtained through aggregator collections.

This is the ICOLC Statement of Current Perspective and Preferred Practices for Selection and Purchase of Electronic Information. The statement says, "Preferred Pricing Practices - Reaffirmed A. Non-disclosure language should not be required for any licensing agreement, particularly language that would preclude library consortia from sharing pricing and other significant terms and conditions with other consortia. B. Providers should not expect libraries to pay the entire cost of their research and development to bring new electronic products to market. These costs should be shared by the company shareholders and amortized by the provider so current prices for electronic information are sufficiently affordable to encourage experimentation and ultimately widespread use. This strategy will offer providers a better long-term revenue stream from which to recover their research and development costs. C. Libraries should have the option to purchase the electronic product without the paper subscription, and the electronic product should cost substantially less than the printed subscription price. See Section A. below for more detail. D. Bundling electronic and print subscriptions in non-flexible multi-year packages must not be the sole pricing option for purchasing electronic information. For example, licenses and purchase agreements for electronic journals, after the initial pricing year, cannot remain on an unchangeable fixed economic course." (paragraphs 12 - 16 of the URL)

Drexel University's W. W. Hagerty Library received funding [1] in the Fall of 2000 from the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to study the impact of a library's shift to electronic journals on staff and costs. The goals were to perform a comparative analysis for Drexel's library (a case study) and to develop a model for use by other libraries. The results suggest that, when all costs are considered, electronic journals are more cost effective on a per use basis. Storage space for low use bound journals is a major expense. A readership survey shows that the library's electronic collection is widely accepted and extensively used. Since there are methodological difficulties with the data available to make the analyses, this study should be viewed as a single first step to address an issue of critical importance to academic libraries.

"digital publishing seems to be getting more expensive while we wring costs out of print as we draw it down."

This is the final report of the JISC EI-ASPM Project, which was commissioned by JISC to explore whether there are new opportunities and new models for scholarly publishing that would better serve researchers and better communicate and disseminate research findings." />www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx

This article discusses the cost-benefit analysis of journal subscriptions in research libraries. It also discusses the methodology used to determine whether or not journal articles are actually read and used by researchers. There is some discussion regarding the cost of digital vs. print resources, but the discussion is minimal.

A 2004 article about the estimated costs for the print-to-digital transition at the University of California. Discusses the idea of a central print repository to back up electronic journals. Some numbers discussed, but not many.

This article was written in 1992, well before electronic journals and resources were common. This study examines the economic pressures on libraries, and embraces the possibility that new methods of electronic distribution of resources will help reduce these cost pressures.

Now, most of the attention on changes in scholarly publishing has been focused on e-journals. We wish to expand that circle of light so that it takes in the indexing of serials. The index, as every scholar knows, is critical to the quality of the research. The value of a library's serial collection is only as good as its indexing. What scholar has not wondered about the impact of overlapping, inconsistent, and incomplete indexing services on their work? When the weaknesses of the current indexing services are matched against the potential of open-access systems, we may have a tipping point in convincing scholars that the profession would be far better served by open-access publishing systems. We argue that a primary candidate for scholarly publishing's tipping point is the coherence, integration, and precision that these open-access systems can bring to the scholarly exchange and enhancement of knowledge, especially when compared to the current state of the serial index and the hit-and-miss of full-text Web searches.

There is a chart of costs of some electronic indexes, although it may be outdates (2000-01). This article examines the degree of overlap between different academic databases.

This article is a status report of the usage of eBooks on college campuses. Here is a quote in the article, "John Barnes of Cengage (formerly Gale) told the Charleston audience that, while his company still sells more print than electronic reference, users prefer electronic. He believes libraries should "move faster away from print reference" to meet user needs and increase usage. He cited a study done by Wright State University's Sue Polanka that found much greater use of an electronic collection than a print one, even though the electronic collection was only a fraction of the size of the print one. Further, the cost per use for the electronic collection was less than one-fifth of the cost per use of the print collection." We may want to find that Wright State University study. From the above quote, it seems to point to the feasibility of an all-digital library.

The UC Merced Library motto, "Not what other research libraries are . . . what they will be," sums up an ambitious, if not outright audacious goal: to create the template for the research library of the Twenty-First Century. As envisioned by Founding University Librarian Bruce Miller and the staff of the Library, being a Twenty-First Century research library does not mean jumping on the latest technology bandwagon or simply branding UC Merced Library as "the virtual library." Instead, the vision requires going back to the basic principles of librarianship-connecting readers with books, information seekers with information-and then making these connections in the most efficient and cost-effective way, whether this means using the technology of online information, purchasing a printed book, or borrowing a printed book from among the 34 million volumes owned by the combined libraries of the ten University of California campuses which comprise, in the aggregate, the largest research library in the Western Hemisphere and, by some measures, the entire world.

Predictions that etextbooks on the way--studies of student uses of e-textbooks

This author proposes and innovative method of pricing e-textbooks so that the publisher still maintains an adequate revenue stream and the individual cost per student is far lower than purchasing a printed textbook.

The Shift Away From Print By Eileen Gifford Fenton and Roger C. Schonfeld For most scholarly journals, the transition away from the print format and to an exclusive reliance on the electronic version seems all but inevitable, driven by user preferences for electronic journals and concerns about collecting the same information in two formats. But this shift away from print, in the absence of strategic planning by a higher proportion of libraries and publishers, may endanger the viability of certain journals and even the journal literature more broadly - while not even reducing costs in the ways that have long been assumed.

This article is slightly dated: 2002. It discusses a study of the impact of electronic journals on the staffing needs of academic librarie, specifically, the decreased need of ILL staff. Some other cost issues are touched upon as well.

We don't know how soon it will happen, but it is happening and it will be consummated soon. The commodity of the book, as we have known it for the last few decades, is vanishing and being replaced by new electronic media. Paper-and-binding books have irrevocably begun to fade away as products of mass consumption and will soon transform themselves into curios like vinyl records.

This bookmark can be deleted. This is a nice personal essay about the impact of the cost vs. benefits of textbooks, but of no value to our study.

How will scholars have access to print collections if libraries go digital? "This working group was convened in December 2007 to advance the work originally begun under the auspices of the North American Storage Trust, to develop a common understanding of the inter-institutional agreements necessary to promote cost-effective management of legacy print collections. The committee was charged with compiling and synthesizing policy documentation for shared print collections so that common requirements might be identified."

"The goal of the Collection Management Initiative was to explore issues associated with integrating and managing research library journal collections comprising print and digital formats. The study sought to explore ways that the University of California could leverage its investment in digital library collections by providing campuses with new approaches for managing their print collections with greater flexibility, given the constraints imposed by existing facilities and limited capital funding. The Collection Management Initiative encompassed three complementary research components. The first component, the Journal Use Study, concentrated on assessing the impact on the user community when print materials are removed from campus library collections and users must rely on digital equivalents. The second component focused on user behaviors and preferences gleaned through surveys and structured interviews. The third component was designed to gather data on the costs and benefits of removing print materials from library collections and relying on digital equivalents."

"In recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to living amid the smoking wreckage of various once-proud industries-automakers bankrupt, brand-name Wall Street banks in ruins, newspapers dying by the dozen. It's tempting in such circumstances to take comfort in the seeming permanency of our colleges and universities, in the notion that our world-beating higher education system will reliably produce research and knowledge workers for decades to come. But this is an illusion. Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They're also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows. In combination, these two trends threaten to shake the foundation of the modern university, in much the same way that other seemingly impregnable institutions have been torn apart. In some ways, the upheaval will be a welcome one. Students will benefit enormously from radically lower prices-particularly people like Solvig who lack disposable income and need higher learning to compete in an ever-more treacherous economy. But these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next."

"Libraries are drenched in atoms. The physical storage of books, in one place, make less and less sense, especially when you consider that 90% of the books are not checked out in five years. My recent experience with the Boston Public Library, however, is that it is always full. It is a place to study and find quiet. It is a place to meet people. It is a way to browse information in a physical manner. Nonethess, the sheer cost of binding, shipping, storing, rearranging and replacing physical books will drive the change to virtual books in place like Boston. In places like remote Africa, they have no alternative and this change is welcome, the sooner the better."