More on Stanford and the "Big Deal"
The local alumni rag has an article on Stanford University's response to the Serials crisis. It's chock full of details, anecdotal and otherwise:
At a time when their budget is being reduced by two or three percent each year, and the cost of many journals is rising by 10 percent annually, University librarians are trying to weed out titles that get little use. Last year, the science and technology libraries cancelled 489 titles for a savings of $504,000; cancellations over the previous three years netted $854,000 in savings. �Stanford has a very lean list of serial subscriptions, and every cancellation now is painful,� says University librarian Michael Keller.Given Elsevier�s prominence in the sciences, Stanford continues to subscribe to 400 of the 1,700 journals the company publishes, at a cost of about $1.2 million per year. The periodicals account for less than 2 percent of the libraries� 28,000 subscriptions, but represent roughly 20 percent of the annual journal budget of about $6 million.
The article doesn't explicitly say, but I believe that the figures are only for what's known here as SUL: -- not any of the grad school/coordinate libraries (business, law and medicine) or the Hoover Institute library.