Sustainable Scholarship: Libraries Collections as a Service 10/18/21
PUBLIC STATEMENT
October 18, 2021
The University of Washington Libraries welcomed new and returning members of the Faculty Council on University Libraries on October 13, 2021. This was an opportunity to reflect on the past two years and reiterate how the Libraries has and will continue to align our values with our actions, see blog post For the public good: our values in a changing scholarly communication landscape. We start the 2021-22 academic year by acknowledging the instability and unsustainability of our current circumstances, and by confronting these challenges with strategies that are intended to support access to and promote preservation of the widest range of educational, cultural, scientific, and historical resources possible, see FCUL 10/13 slides.
The Libraries 2020-21 subscription review is an example of implementing a cooperative collection development and delivery strategy to maximize collection budgets and enable sustainable scholarship. Last month I provided an update on our progress, see 9/22 update. This process started November 2020 with database cancellations, expanded in February 2021 to include journal subscriptions, and involved developing principles & rubric for subscription review in collaboration with the FCUL and consultation with faculty by Subject Librarians. We received hundreds of comments from the UW community on the initial proposed list of subscription cancellations for 2022. With a reduced cancellation target, we were able to retain many of the subscriptions on the initial proposed cancellation list. The final list of cancelled journal titles will be posted by the end of the month. The UW community will continue to retain immediate access to articles published before 2022, and older content may be available in print. New articles starting in 2022 will be available through the Libraries Interlibrary Loan (ILL) services. For questions about specific journal titles, please contact your Libraries Subject Librarian.
Associate Dean for Collections & Content