Managing the Electronic Collection with Cost per Use Data

This paper reviews some of the early efforts to develop cost per use data for electronic collections and discusses some of the ways libraries, consortia, and publishers currently use unit cost information to make management decisions. Emerging trends in the standardization of electronic usage statistics and concurrent utilization of cost per use data to manage electronic collections hold tremendous potential for libraries and library consortia to increasingly employ reliable cost and use data to support collection development and management decisions.