Journal renewal period is September-October and arrives at a time when subject librarians are busy teaching and meeting with new students and faculty, leaving little time for anything else, especially making difficult decisions such as cancelling journals with an ever-rising price tag. We developed a cascading model for evaluating journal subscriptions. It is based on several variables, such as accessibility, value, price and usage. Paraprofessionals can populate the model with data, reducing the librarians' work considerably. The model was tested for print and e-journals, for small journals packages and large renewal lists. Introduction and BackgroundThe University of Ottawa, offering more than 450 programs in 10 faculties, is the largest bilingual (English-French) university in the world and among Canada's top 10 research universities. The library has a dozen locations: the Morisset library covers most disciplines and houses Archives and Special Collections, the Media Library and the Geographical, Statistical and Government Information Center; the Law Library, the Health Sciences Library, the Education Information Center and several libraries with very small or no physical collections such as Music, Management, Social Sciences, Heart Institute libraries. The library has also an off-campus storage facility, known as the Library Annex.The Library has a rich collection of journals and subscribes to over 25,000 titles. Most of them are in bundled subscriptions, ranging from the common "big deals" offered by major academic publishers to consortia, in "small deals" as I like to call the packages offered by specialized publishers, which have from a dozen to 100 journals, through subscription agents, and direct from small publishers. An additional 75,000 journals are available through the different full-text databases to which we subscribe. More than ten years ago we adopted the online preferred format for journals in our collection development policy, so most of our journals are online. The Annex houses the bulk of the print copies, mainly back issues, and current print journals can be found in each library.The collection manager team is headed by the Associate University Librarian for collections and three collection managers, one responsible for law, the second for health sciences and the third, for all the other subjects. Their decisions, based on input from the subject librarians, are in regards to multidisciplinary and consortia products. The subject specialists, responsible for one or more disciplines, are responsible for ensuring the collection development for each of their discipline, liaising with faculty, offering instruction and reference to students and faculty. The Acquisitions department is responsible for handling renewals. At the beginning of the fiscal year collection managers will decide upon the acceptable increase rate for periodicals, taking into account the current state of the budget, inflation, and the EBSCO serials price projection report. In previous years this rate was 6%, meaning...

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