Electronic resources and acquisitions budgets: SUNY statistics, 1994‐2000

The amount of electronic resources available in academic libraries has greatly increased in the past several years, and a number of writers have commented that electronic resources are replacing acquisitions in other formats. To see how an increase in acquisitions of electronic resources was affecting overall acquisitions, statistics for the libraries of the State University of New York (SUNY) were examined, and a related survey was done of librarians at those institutions. One conclusion was that the amount spent on electronic resources has not continually increased, but in fact decreased in some years. Another conclusion was that although electronic resources are consuming a higher proportion of the overall acquisitions budget, at least in the SUNY system the money is not necessarily coming at the expense of acquisitions in other formats.