A COMPARISON OF SUBSCRIBED AND NON-SUBSCRIBED TITLES IN THE SPRINGER LINK ELECTRONIC JOURNAL PACKAGE

by Lafferty, Meghan

Bundled electronic journal packages which include all of a publisher's journal titles have been criticized for weakening collections with the inclusion of titles collection developers would not have otherwise selected. Others have claimed it is best to give patrons access to as much information as possible. This study compared the usage of titles to which the University of North Carolina (UNC) subscribes with non-subscribed titles included in the Springer Link electronic journal package. The Chemical Sciences and Medicine subsets of the Springer Link collection were also examined. The results indicated that titles to which UNC subscribes received over five times as much use and were more likely to receive any use at all than non-subscribed titles.