A fuzzy bicriteria approach for journal deselection in a hospital library

Abstract

Collection management is an important duty of librarians. In the last years journal prices have increased and library decision-makers have been forced to consider cancelling some journal subscriptions as budgets have not increased always by the same ratio. This fact has made it essential to supply reliable and efficient measures about the importance of different journals for in-house users in order to help the decision-makers to cancel subscriptions. Many journal-use studies can be found in the literature providing methods for making these kinds of decisions, but usually they consider only one single and precise decision criterion. Nevertheless, it is common knowledge that any real decision usually considers more than one criterion, and so the problem of choosing a set of journals to cancel is compounded by the existence of conflicting criteria, such as the cost of the journal and demand for the journal. As predicting possible number of users of a certain journal is a complex task, the expert's judgments could be vital elements. Fuzzy Set theory could be a useful tool in dealing with these kinds of real decisions based on the expert's knowledge and characterized by some level of subjectivity, in which the decision-maker has imprecise and/or vague data and/or incomplete information. In this paper a fuzzy bicriteria optimisation method is proposed to determine the optimal shape of the printed journal collection in a medical library in a Spanish public hospital. We jointly consider two criteria: maximising a usage function and also an opportunity coefficient of purchase function, both defined for each printed journal. Budget constraints and minimum availability constraints are taken into account. The proposed model is flexible, incorporates expert knowledge and can be easily extended to other hospital libraries