Reduction of duplicate scientific journal titles in Greek libraries: an economic assessment

In 1983, the National Hellenic Documentation Centre started the development of the Union Catalogue of Periodicals in the Hellenic Scientific and Technological Libraries. The union catalogue was developed in a database form. Today (January 2000), the union catalogue includes 206 Hellenic scientific, technological and medical libraries, two of which are located in Cyprus. These libraries belong to a wide range of organisational and institutional types, such as universities, hospitals, research institutions, private companies and commercial banks, covering all scientific and technological fields. The total national collection of serials amounts to 22,790 unique titles, which correspond to 57,790 subscriptions. The overlapping coefficient is at 2.53 (= subscriptions per unique journal title). The annual cost comes to 25,195 million Euros (1 Euro = 328 drachmas). A macroeconomic approach is attempted, to investigate the upper and lower levels of savings that could be realised by reduction of over-lapping subscriptions. While library budgets have been continuously cut during recent years, under certain conditions, a reasonable and coordinated reconstruction of the individual libraries’ collections could save every year 20%–50% of the total subscription cost and therefore expand the national collection by the same percentage. Two important steps towards these directions were the development of the Hellenic Interlibrary Loan Network and the Hellenic Academic Library Link.