Confronting the cost of information for a research library in the developing world—The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago's experience

SummaryResearch, particularly in the engineering and science disciplines, benefits from being able to scan comprehensively the content of journals, and then access the full text of the articles. The former requires subscriptions to abstracting and indexing resources, but there are ways of keeping this cost to a minimum through Internet access and publishers’ websites. Access to full papers is expensive but ‘just-in-time’ access satisfies researchers’ needs and keeps costs down as compared to ‘just-in-case’ subscriptions. New strategies with changed publishing and librarian attitudes are required if a library is to improve its capability to meet the information needs of the academic community effectively within budget. Fortunately there are a number of ways to give researchers access to authoritative scholarly quality information at much reduced, or even no cost. This paper discusses a number of these that have been successful at the University of the West Indies, Engineering and Physical Sciences Division of the Main Library.