Cost-Benefit Analysis of Electronic Information Resources: An Evaluation of the Middle East Technical University Library

In recent years there has been a rapid transition from print to electronic resources. Significant amount of library budgets are allocated for licensing electronic resources. Identifying and analyzing the benefits and costs of this new trend is therefore important for academic libraries. In this presentation experiences of METU (Middle East Technical University) Library on licensing and usage of electronic resources is evaluated by providing a cost-benefit analysis based on the cost and usage statistics of electronic resources. METU is founded in 1956 and it is the largest technical university in Turkey with 5 faculties and 5 institutes. The university has nearly 14.000 undergraduate, 5.000 graduate students and 2.000 academic staff. Being founder and member of ANKOS, the first university library consortium in Turkey, METU has developed electronic resources collection since 2000. Number of databases and electronic journals has been increased rapidly for last five years. The university subscribes to 46 databases and nearly 22.000 electronic journals available from this databases according to 2005 data. Electronic resources cost, over the years, considerable amount of money for METU and their usage has also increased gradually. METU has the highest usage among ANKOS members with over 800.000 full text articles download in 2005. The high usage of electronic resources in METU reduces the unit cost of databases. Statistics show that a small number of “core” journals satisfy significant amount of use while the majority of journals are used less frequently. In order to maximize the benefits of electronic resources it is necessary to analyze cost and usage statistics in detail at both institutional and consortial levels by using various techniques. The results obtained from such studies can be used as guidelines for the development of collections of electronic resources, consortial agreements and user education programs