While Brooklyn spends a significant portion of its own budget (more than $100,000 in 1999/2000) to acquire electronic information resources, like other CUNY schools we also rely on the University's support for some number of these popular yet costly materials. Within the limits of the central office's budget for such products, the librarians who make up the Electronic Resources Advisory Committee (ERAC) evaluate and recommend the purchase of various e-resources. Brooklyn is well represented on this group by Beth Evans (our representative) and Susan Vaughn (who chairs ERAC). In 1999/2000 the Advisory Committee reviewed many new e-resources and developed a list of titles it wished to add for the 2000/2001 year. However, in the end the University had no new money for this purpose, and the recommendations were not implemented. Within CUNY, pricing models for electronic resources vary:
Whatever the model, the benefit Brooklyn realizes from CUNY-central's negotiating power and that obtained through our other consortial relationships is substantial. (Susan Vaughn participates in the semi-monthly meetings of the State's Consortia of Library Consortiums, a group which discusses new approaches to acquiring electronic resources and licensing issues.)
While libraries are quick to criticize the publishers of electronic information for steep and cavalier price increases, this year we learned that librarians can also renege on commitments.
In the fall 1999 CUNY's Council of Chief Librarians agreed to a pricing formula (based on product usage) to be applied to jointly-purchased e-resources. One year later, as a group of libraries began Year 3 of their joint contract for the journals of the American Chemical Society, City College threatened to pull out of the deal (raising the price for each of the remaining CUNY libraries) unless her sister schools agreed to subsidize City's usage, the highest in the group. A meeting was held November 10 among the largest users of the product (Brooklyn, City, Hunter, Graduate Center, and Queens) to discuss City's stance. In the end, City backed down, and the pricing formula was revised only slightly, somewhat softening the annual impact of renewing any product whose cost is shared among a group of libraries: rather than actual annual usage, the chief librarians decided to use a rolling three-year average to apportion costs. As each person left the room, she certainly understood that even library-to-library agreements are subject to breach and revision. ("Revision" is not surprising, since e-resources are still in their infancy, in terms of pricing models.)