Electronic Resource Management: A Multi-Period Capital Budgeting Approach

Electronic resource management in academic libraries involves determining which subscriptions to continue, which to end, and which to start each period. This can be modeled as a typical capital budgeting problem, as resources are limited, with the complication that returns are non-financial. This article examines two such models with different objective functions used to "value" subscriptions given the data available on their usage. The models are tested on data collected from 52 different journals subscribed to by Lehigh University over the past two years. It is believed that models of this type will become more useful as electronic usage data becomes more readily available and standardized.