"When I think of "serials" in a library, I think of the peer-reviewed scholarly literature; I tend to use "journals" to mean the same thing. This is very, very wrong." - Bill Hooker

the prices for the Russian translation journals like tripled when they moved to Springer from AIP - a bunch of libraries cancelled... also nasty stuff going on with the merging of Blackwell and Wiley... expect those costs/use to go up as they are now on a crappy platform and more expensive. - Christina Pikas

Well, yes--some of us have long argued that there isn't a serials crisis for library budgets, there's a scholarly journal crisis. Magazines (and there are about 1/4 million magazines as compared to about 25,000 scholarly journals) tend to have very low prices and very modest increases. - Walt Crawford

I'd also wonder about that 3,570-library figure; there aren't anywhere near 3,570 institutions in the U.S. that you'd expect to have broad collections of scholarly journals. Wonder if the NCES number includes branch libraries? Otherwise, though the 10:1 ratio for UC (that is, scholarly journals averaging 10x as expensive as all serials) sounds about right. - Walt Crawford

Christina, Walt, thanks so much for the input! Librarians already know much of what I'm trying to find out -- it kills me that I never knew that, in other words, my professional development never included any information on what librarians know and can do. - Bill Hooker

In re: the 3570 libraries, the names are listed in the first column of this spreadsheet: http://www.sennoma.net/main..., I'd love to know what your reaction is to the list. (I'll update the post with that spreadsheet and see whether I forgot to make any others available.) - Bill Hooker

Bill: I stand corrected. I'd forgotten about all the teeny-tiny places (and institute libraries within campuses). Sorting by total expenditures is extremely revealing: 127 (most but not all ARL) greater than $10 million, 571 >$2 million, 975 > $1 million. (And, to be sure, about 100 with no budget at all!) - Walt Crawford

Total budget for the bottom 2,600 is less than for the top 19. - Walt Crawford

Yet another long tail. No surprise there I guess. Makes it difficult to represent or sample the set though: mean and median aren't all that meaningful... I'm thinking about how to get the detailed data about who subscribes to what, and since surveying *everyone* is too much, a sample is called for -- but how to choose from such a distribution? - Bill Hooker

More striking: Look at EXCUSER (serials cost?): 2,682 libraries with less than $100,000 each = total $66.08 million, which is less than the top seven institutions combined. - Walt Crawford

Yep, EXpenses for CUrrent SERials. I wonder if there's a haves vs have-nots line: above that line, ARListas, whom you could represent by sampling a dozen big libraries; below it, the teenies -- how would you sample them? - Bill Hooker

I'm not sure you can really sample ARL libraries--particularly since the Top 25 (and maybe the Top Dozen) are in a different subcategory than the rest. And there are a few hundred fairly-big academic libraries below the ARL group. - Walt Crawford