Can we subscribe to this please?: realizing a core journal collection for the University of Sussex

In 2005, like many HE institutions, the University of Sussex Library was confronting the problems of resourcing journal provision to support its teaching and research. These included increasing costs (with wide discrepancies of price across the subjects), the potential increase in access of content (such as NESLi2 consortia, deals, etc.), greater interdisciplinary research and a requirement for more non-traditional academic titles. This was coupled with an expectation from students and staff that the Library should be responding to the explosion in availability of online journal content. It was concluded that the existing budgetary model and method of reviewing subscriptions was becoming very cumbersome and not up to the task.It became essential to formulate an innovatory method by which the Library could be confident that its journal collections supported the teaching and research work at the University. This article will detail the steps taken in the last two years to deal with this.