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Re: FTE-based pricing

I am the acquisitions librarian at a very small (350 FTE) liberal arts college. There are several databases that we can only subscribe to because they are willing to consider FTE pricing. We have an extremely limited budget and have been very challenged by rising journal and database costs.

Expecting us to pay the same price as a 10,000 FTE campus, or even a 1,000 FTE campus is unfair and has kept us from subscribing to databases in the past.

Elsa Anderson


Stefanie Wittenbach wrote:

I personally believe that FTE-based pricing is quite harmful to
the library community for the following reasons:

Use is not necessarily tied to the institution's FTE. Growing
campuses are penalized because the price continues to increase,
but the users of the resource may not be growing in the same way.

If anything, I think database pricing should be a flat rate or
flat rate plus some factor for high use.

Stefanie

Stefanie Wittenbach
Assistant Dean, Collections
John Peace Library
The University of Texas at San Antonio
San Antonio, TX  78249-0671
stefanie.wittenbach@utsa.edu