I thought I should provide an update on what’s happening with the annual Review of Continuing Resources.  We’ve put a lot of work into reviewing subscriptions in each of the past four years so we thought we’d have a break this year.  We also considered that library staff are busy with other work particularly with the Education Library move and reviewing the collections.

There are a couple of pieces of work we should do this year however.  We need to have another look at the remaining monograph standing orders that haven’t been cancelled and I’ll be following up on this shortly.  The other area is new subscription recommendations.  A number of new subscription recommendations have come to Datasets in recent times.  Datasets has been talking about how we consider these in a fair and equitable way across the University, bearing in mind we have little room in the budget to take on new subscriptions without reducing costs elsewhere such as through cancellations.  We’ve relied on cancellations from the Continuing Resources Review in recent years to free up money for new subscriptions.

Our thinking is to do this in a fairly soft way this year by asking liaison librarians and subject specialists to let us know of any new needs you’re aware of in your subject areas and what cancellation suggestions you have to help fund any new needs.  We could then arrange for:

• wider consultation in June/July
• a meeting of IRAG to look at what’s been recommended / offered as a cancellation candidate
• then seeing what the possibilities are.

We’d be glad to receive any suggestions on how you think calling for new subscription recommendations could best be handled this year.  Datasets will be looking to make a decision regarding our process within the next few weeks.