April 19, 2004 Dear Professor, As you know, UC budgets in the next fiscal year will again struggle with significant reductions. After being given a 6% cut this year, the UCSB Libraries face another 7.5% cut based on the governor's current proposals. We cannot anticipate budget relief for at least the next couple of years. In addition, serials price increases are expected to be well above the consumer price index, further reducing buying power for the Libraries' collections. The Libraries continue to employ strategies to mitigate the impact of these expected reductions and to ensure the breadth of holdings and services needed by our campus. One of our continuing approaches is to find ways to achieve significant monetary savings, while not losing access to unique information content relevant to the research and teaching of UCSB faculty, staff and students. To accomplish this last year, the Libraries identified a large number of serials for which we purchased both print and electronic versions of a title. The de-duplication of formats (opting to receive titles in electronic form only) produced enough savings for us to stretch our limited resources to meet serials inflation of about 7-8%, and prevented us from having to cancel any unique content or titles this year. We face similar serials inflation increases again in the coming year. This spring, we need to identify as much additional content as possible for de-duplication of formats to avoid having to cancel unique serials titles for 2005. Titles are being designated for de-duplication where we feel that we can rely solely on the electronic version of the title with a minimum of problems for our campus community. We have selected titles where the long-term archiving and accessibility of the content are assured. We plan to continue to provide you, whenever needed, print copies of articles from these titles through interlibrary loan and document delivery services. The results of the recent UC-wide Collection Management Initiative (CMI) research sponsored by the Mellon Foundation have supported our decision-making. The study confirms that UC library users overwhelmingly prefer to use the electronic version as opposed to a print version of a serial title when it is available and complete. For more information on this study see http://www.ucop.edu/cmi/welcome.html. The list of all serial titles included in the latest format review is available at http://www.library.ucsb.edu/administration/format/. While we have carefully reviewed these titles, we understand there may be special circumstances concerning a particular title. If you have comments, please contact Marilyn Moody, AUL for Information and Research Services (moody@library.ucsb.edu), or Lucia Snowhill, Head, Collections Development Department (snowhill@library.ucsb.edu). Please send any comments by May 20, 2004. The UCSB campus has been very dedicated in recent years in helping to build our library collections and services. The Libraries continue the commitment to supporting the research, teaching and learning of our faculty, staff and students. Your support of this format review will help us to maintain our library resources during these difficult economic times. With my personal thanks, Sarah M. Pritchard University Librarian