Cutting Deep: Maintaining A Licensed Data Collection Amid Abrupt and Unexpected Collections Budget Reductions

With UC San Diego facing significant state, university, and library budget constraints, the Library’s collection strategists were asked to reduce local collections spending by approximately $1.5 million for FY2025-2026. Given the many subscriptions scheduled to renew at the beginning of the fiscal year in July, these decisions needed to be made within about two months. At the same time, federal government information and data was disappearing from the web at unprecedented rates, and a major vendor had just announced it was ending perpetual access sales of its products, calling into question the long-term viability of these previously reliable sources. This presentation will start with an overview of the collection landscape at UC San Diego and a description of the Library’s collections cutting project. Then, it will detail the Social Sciences Collection Strategist’s approach to determining which data and statistics subscriptions to keep or cancel. It will conclude by sharing lessons learned during this project.