Implication of 80/20 Rule in Electronic Journal Usage of UGC-Infonet Consortia

This study aims to understand the implication of the 80/20 rule in large academic library consortia. INFLIBNET initiative-UGC-Infonet is the largest academic consortia initiative in Indian higher education that provides services to 414 institutional members across the country. A total of eighteen publishers and aggregators (N = 6854 journals) from COUNTER usage data for the year 2011 was collected from the INFLIBNET Centre. Cumulative download and cumulative percentage of the journals were calculated from the downloaded counts to generate a Pareto chart using Microsoft Excel 2007. The result of the study suggests that the 80/20 rule in large consortia is truly, if not precisely in conformity, when consolidated usage of journals across eighteen (18) publishers are put together at 85%/15%. Contrastingly, differences in the result are observed when titles are analyzed individually according to the publishers demonstrating a reverse of the 80/20 principle.