The University Libraries are an essential research and teaching partner for Appalachian State University’s community. We are committed to providing collections that support the current needs of our students, faculty, researchers, and staff. We work hard to ensure we are making sound collections decisions for our campus community.
Our Challenge
This year we are facing four issues that are significantly impacting our collections budget:
- Rising costs: Academic publisher business models include annual inflation rates that average 6%, ranging from 3% to 12% depending on the resource. This is a cost pressure that all academic libraries face, in a market that is dominated by just five major publishers, leaving little room for negotiation.
- Program needs: New academic programs launched by the University in recent years require additional resources. The more specialized the program, often the more costly the resources.
- Timelines: Purchasing timelines that worked in the past need to be realigned to better match our budget cycle.
- Budget: The lack of a State budget is constraining all of us, not just the Libraries.
We are not able to maintain all existing subscriptions and resources and have identified resources for non-renewal. Most of those resources’ subscriptions ended on 12/31/2025. These resources were primarily high cost-per-use, low usage, or substantially similar to other resources that we are keeping.
Our Response
With the campus budget uncertainty, University administration encouraged us to figure out how to work in a different way with constrained resources. We have evaluated our collections and taken the following steps to address this year’s budget challenges, and to lay groundwork for future years’ collections strategies:
- Assertively negotiated with publishers and vendors to reduce prices.
- Assessed our collections by prioritizing following metrics:
- Cost-per-use analysis of electronic resources
- Percentage use analysis of titles in large electronic journal and ebook packages
- Shifting print subscriptions to electronic, as available
- Using AppAnalytics data for identifying trends in departmental and disciplinary enrollment
- Reviewing departmental and disciplinary representation in our collections
- Ongoing assessment of resource needs for new programs
- Open access support
- Consulted with faculty on their research and instructional resource needs.
- Leveraged endowment funds to make one-time purchases this year.
- Implemented Rapido, a new interlibrary loan service that facilitates requests for materials directly from Library Search, the new library interface.
We regularly use various methods to understand the value of our collections and guide our acquisitions decisions. Factors include quality, usage, uniqueness, faculty contributions, open access, usability, and cost. We used those same factors to guide our decision making for this year’s non-renewals.
Our Future
We are exploring innovative alternatives to purchased content so we can stabilize our buying power and develop greater flexibility in the future. We are committed to being good stewards of State and student funds, providing access to essential resources, and providing support to help you utilize the content we provide. No matter how difficult the situation, we will never cease advocating for your right to access the information you need.
Contact Us
As users of our collections, we value your input. Is there a resource that would benefit your research or instruction? Is there a resource you used in graduate school that you’d like to have here? Is there a resource that is no longer of value and could be replaced by a better one? If you’d like to request resources, please do so through our contact form and select “Suggest Material for Library Purchase” in the category field. We also encourage you to regularly communicate with the faculty librarians who serve as a liaison to your department or program. We welcome opportunities to meet with you to discuss how the Libraries can best support you.
If you have questions, comments, concerns, or suggestions, please contact Molly Keener, Associate Dean for Collections, at keenermw1@appstate.edu.