Portland State University Library General Collections Guidebook

The fiscal year 2020-2021 general collections budget for the PSU Library is $4,059,081 from our education and general funds. This money is divided up between electronic resources which can be databases, data sets, journal packages, journal subscriptions, one time purchased ebooks & streaming media and the purchase of physical materials which are generally DVDs, newspapers, print magazines & journals, and print books.

In the past five years, we have received funding from the Office of Academic Affairs to cover inflationary costs on packages and ongoing subscriptions. This year, we are asking providers to either keep us at a flat inflationary rate (same cost in 2021 as the costs were in 2020) or at a rate of no more than 2% last year’s cost in order to avoid significant cancellation of content. We have been successful in negotiating these percentages with most providers for this fiscal year.

Our goal is to fund collections at the macro level as opposed to the micro level in order to leverage our funding as best possible. Here is what the general format breakdown looks like: As the pie chart indicates, EJournals & Databases are the major expenditures of the collections budget. The PSU Library provides access to a multitude of databases for instruction and research. Access the A-Z listing of database and article resources to find databases.

Given the current budget, in order to add new databases, we would need to cut one of similar cost in the same subject area. Databases can be ordered during the course of the fiscal year. The PSU Library prefers to run a trial to make sure databases work in our online environment prior to purchasing. To request a trial of a database, contact your subject liaison or the suggest a purchase form.

The PSU Library has subscription agreements with the majority of scholarly society and commercial publishers in North America & Europe. In some cases, the journals are bought as a collection from a single scholarly publisher such as the American Chemical Society, Cambridge University Press journals, Elsevier Science Direct journals, and the University of Chicago journals. In other cases, we buy journal titles individually from providers such as DeGruyter Publications and Oxford University Press.

New journals emerge annually, journal titles change, and journals move from one scholarly publisher to another. For tips on searching for articles and journals, use this guide. If you are unable to locate a journal title in the Primo, the library catalog, please contact your subject liaison or fill out a suggest a purchase form.

Institutional journal subscriptions are supplied on a calendar year from January-December by scholarly societies and commercial publishers. For this reason, the PSU Library tries to order all new titles in either the summer or fall months. As with databases, we currently cannot add a new journal title without removing one of equal cost in the same discipline. Open access journals can be added to our catalog at any time.

The PSU Library purchases ebooks in numerous ways and are committed to buying ebooks that have no digital rights management (DRM) or very limited DRM used. Digital rights management means limitations on the number of users able to access a book simultaneously, limits on the number of pages that can be printed, and limits on the number of downloads allowed in a given year. For this reason, we currently avoid buying ebook titles that are limited to a single user or three users at a time.

We support the front list (current year titles) purchases of unlimited access ebook titles through our consortium, the Orbis Cascade Alliance, from the following publishers:

• Oxford University Press
• John Wiley Online Library

In addition, through our consortium, we also have access to a subscription base of unlimited access academic ebooks from ProQuest Ebook Central and a collection of unlimited access science technical, & medical (STM) ebook titles from Cambridge University Press. With both of these packages, we can lose ebook access annually.