Introduction

In recent years there has been a considerable and significant shift towards delivering, accessing and storing scholarly content in an online format. We have witnessed the mass proliferation of subscribed and freely available digital content across all formats traditionally collected by academic libraries. Crucially, empirical data on user behaviour demonstrates that in almost all subject areas there is an ever-increasing preference for retrieving content online. In fact, the availability of an instantly accessible format for information is now expected and presumed by most scholars and students, as noted in the USA-based 2009 Annual Faculty Survey: ‘Faculty attitudes suggest that a tipping point has been passed for journal current issues, and, with certain narrow exceptions, that print editions of current issues of scholarly journals are rapidly becoming a thing of the past’. (Schonfeld and Housewright, 2010, 1).

The model for providing online access to journals is the most mature in respect of online content and has led the way in offering solutions to the challenges information professionals now face. This publication format will be explored in more detail here. It must be acknowledged, however, that many of the methods and philosophies of collecting, budgeting, storing and providing access apply to all online information formats, including books, data and journals currently held in academic libraries.

This chapter will outline the issues involved in managing the shift from print to online, discuss the challenges and explore some of the solutions we are considering and working with in academic libraries today. A number of these solutions anticipate the future for collections and the chapter will consider what this means for the information profession.

Delivering content

The seduction of the ‘Big Deal’

Over the past ten years the widespread take-up of the nationally and regionally negotiated publishers’ ‘Big Deals’ for online content have had an enormous impact on the size and nature of journal collections in Higher Education (HE) libraries globally. In the UK many of the ‘Big Deal’ negotiations are carried out by JISC Collections, through its NESLi2 initiative. These deals, which are essentially single subscriptions to a ‘bundle’ of journals from a publisher, have been widely subscribed to by institutions of all shapes, sizes and budgets.