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The purpose of this article is to introduce a theoretical framework and approach for studying the evaluation and decision-making practices through which academic librarians attempt to reduce the cost of electronic journal subscriptions – an organizational practice known as the unbundling of big deal journal packages.

The article presents a literature-based conceptual analysis of several fields to delineate the elements of the practice of unbundling of big deal journal packages. Beyond analysing the prior literature, the discussion is supported by empirical findings from a pilot study on the topic conducted by two of the article's authors.

The main finding of the article is that the unbundling of big deal packages is a case of what sociologist refers to as decision-making in a social context. By reviewing previous studies, the article identifies the social and material elements constitutive of this practice. This, in turn, allows to develop questions and concepts for future research on the topic and to position it as an area of inquiry within the field of information behaviour/practices.

The article is the first attempt to conceptualize the unbundling of big deal journal packages by highlighting its phenomenological status as a type of information practice. In addition, the article proposes a research approach for studying this type of information practice by drawing on insights from the information behaviour/practice literature and enriching them through practice theory contributions in organizational studies and sociology.

This paper is aimed primarily at academic library managers and acquisition librarians. By analogy to Pareto studying the relationship between clients and turnover, the paper will study subscriptions to e‐journals and usage statistics. The aim is to evaluate the long tail of usage statistics and to compare it with subscription lists of individually selected titles and packages (big deals).

The paper exploits usage statistics and subscription data from a national usage study of an academic publisher. Data are from 2010.

Usage statistics are partly shaped by the long tail effect. Individual subscriptions of journals are more selective than big deals, and trend towards a traditional retail curve. Unlike subscriptions through packages, usage and individual subscriptions can be related by a similar inclination. But both types of subscriptions fail to predict the popularity of a title in its usage.

The paper uses data from a national usage study and tries to identify global trends. Thus, it does not distinguish between customer categories, disciplines or activity domains.

The paper considers the opportunity provided by big deal for acquisition policy. Ready‐made big deals sometimes appear as an unbounded and excessive supply, not suited to true and sufficient users' needs, but on the other hand, selective acquisition policy cannot completely anticipate online usage behaviour.

Only a few studies distinguish Pareto from long tail distributions in usage statistics, and there is little empirical evidence on the impact of selected subscriptions versus big deals on these statistics.

In recent years, a growing number of libraries have canceled or unbundled their “Big Deal” journal subscriptions – those subscriptions that include a full package of digital journal titles for one discounted cost. This started as an affordability problem but has slowly morphed into a challenge from libraries demanding a new pricing structure that accommodates and spurs the growing open access movement.

The change has caused a variety of challenges for technical services units including the increased need for user data, increasingly complicated workflows as they manage partial subscriptions, new interactions with consortia, and ongoing campus conversations. Whether the library is seeking to simply unbundle due to budget constraints, or push for new models such as “read and publish”, there is a tremendous impact on the work of technical services units.

This chapter will explore the rationale and growth of the Big Deal, how it is breaking, four case studies on breaking Big Deals, a brief discussion of new transformative agreements, new challenges for consortia, and implications for technical services units moving forward.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the decision-making process of librarians at the University of Western Ontario who attempted to cancel the Wiley Big Deal. The aim of the study is to reveal the underlying factors that affected their decision-making process. By understanding the decision-making process of librarians, it may be possible to devise a system that takes into consideration not only quantitative factors but also the subjective or qualitative factors that impact librarians’ decisions and thus make it easier to cancel these Big Deals.

The study involved administering an online survey to 25 librarians involved in the cancellation project. Follow-up interviews were conducted with 13 of these librarians to understand at a deeper and more nuanced level the factors that influenced their decisions.

The main finding was that the librarians who participated in the study could be divided into two groups – a data-driven criteria group and a subjective criteria group – based on their ranking of the factors used to make their cancellation decisions. Most librarians interviewed used a mixture of quantitative factors and qualitative factors when making their cancellation decisions. The authors found that those participants who had greater professional experience and a closer relationship with the faculties in their subject areas had more difficulty in cancelling journals. Very few librarians relied on quantitative data alone.

This study is one of few that have examined the subjective factors that influence librarians’ decisions regarding cancellation of Big Deals. It has implications regarding the movement towards centralized collection management and reliance on quantitative data alone when making collection decisions.

Library consortia have played a vital role in sharing information resources among participating libraries. In India, engineering college libraries subscribe to many electronic resources through the Indian Digital Library of Engineering Science and Technology (INDEST) consortium. This paper aims to identify the collection development of electronic resources through INDEST to predict the most required and useful model for engineering colleges.

The list of colleges that subscribe to electronic resources through INDEST was studied online and analyzed.

It is evident that most colleges only subscribed IEL online through INDEST. Some colleges have subscribed to different resources from more than one publisher. The bundles of resources subscribed through INDEST have not fully supported all the courses offered by the institutions. It is revealed that the bibliographical databases for searching the literature in technological sciences were not subscribed to by any colleges participating in INDEST.

The results of this study are useful for engineering college libraries to develop the collection of online journals in the digital era.

This paper aims to review the current library and information science (LIS) literature for document supply, resource sharing and other issues such as open access (OA) that have an impact on the service.

The approach is based on the scanning of about 150 journals, reports, Web sites and blogs.

Nearly all material reviewed is freely available, continuing the trend of increasing OA. As always, these days, much is happening on the OA front. Big deals and Scholarly Communications are reviewed along with ebooks, users and of course ILL.

The only regular literature review that focuses on interlending, document supply and related issues.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the literature concerning interlending and document supply.

The paper is based on the reading of over 130 journals and related material.

Some interesting findings on document supply including an important Outsell report on document suppliers and some research showing that whilst users expect and often make do with what is immediately available, nonetheless over half of the responders use document supply services. Some substantial pieces are reviewed on Big Deals including the dramatic growth in deposits as a result of toughening up the NIH mandate and some further articles on the UK Finch report on open access. The significant developments in Open Access are reflected once again in a lengthy section in this review.

The paper represents a useful resource for librarians and others concerned with interlending and document supply as well as such related matters as resource sharing and open access.

Examines the increase in individual article supply and the resultant effects on journal subscriptions and site licensing, noting that pressure on library budgets has resulted in subscription cancellations but an increase in separates ordering, via document delivery and interlibrary loan (ILL). Increasingly sophisticated search and navigation tools enable users to navigate from a variety of primary, secondary and tertiary resources directly to an article – regardless of where the article is hosted or by which vendor it is sold. The implications for all the participants in the scholarly communications chain are examined and some pertinent questions are asked, including: does individual article supply erode existing publisher business; does the big (consortia) deal provide more value; and is ILL the most economical form of individual article supply? Concludes that both publishers and libraries must re‐examine their business models to counteract end‐users seeking freely available Web‐based or e‐print material, which is undermining the traditional, peer‐reviewed, scholarly communications process.

This paper aims to review the current LIS literature for document supply and related topics.

The paper is based on the scanning of about 150 journals, reports and websites, blogs etc.

Of great interest this quarter are two studies on journal half-lives which impact on the embargo length debate. Also a study that shows a decline in the free accessibility of journal articles. More on patron-driven acquisition and Big Deals.

This is the only regular review of the literature that focuses on document supply and related issues.

The purpose of this study is to identify and examine the factors that affected the scale of ILL photocopy requests between Japanese university libraries from 1994 to 2008.

Based on the newly developed conceptual framework to interpret the rise and fall in ILL, more than 10 million requests, sent through a nation‐wide system called NACSIS‐ILL from 1994 to 2008 were quantitatively analyzed.

The number of photocopy requests for articles in foreign journals started to decrease in 2000, due to the dramatic increase of e‐journal titles made accessible through “Big Deal” contracts that came into effect in 2002 as well as other similar trials prior to it. On the other hand, requests for articles in domestic journals, mostly written in Japanese, continued to increase until 2006. The main factor for this increase was the expansion of journal title coverage in bibliographic databases, which enabled users to retrieve more references. However, requests decreased in 2007, because of advances in digitization in the Japanese academic environment.

This research proposes a conceptual model to understand document demand and service patterns observed in nation‐wide ILL services. It also successfully draws a comprehensive picture of ILL in Japanese higher education institutions, based on more than 10 million request records over 15 years, and it shows how the number of ILL requests correlates with the availability of requested journals in electronic form.

This research proposes a conceptual model to understand document demand and service patterns observed in nation‐wide ILL services. It also successfully draws a comprehensive picture of ILL in Japanese higher education institutions, based on more than 10 million request records over 15 years, and it shows how the number of ILL requests correlates with the availability of requested journals in electronic form.