Difficult meeting today with my new liaison officer for the electronic and electrical engineering department. She's lobbying the (also new) Dean not to have a major database 'cancelled'. We bouhgt it 18 months back with some left over money we had that we'd lose if we didn't spend. We knew it was just for one year but even a year's worth of use was better than nothing. I need to explain to her that characterising it as a 'cancellation' might be politically useful to her, but isn't true of the decisions that were actually taken.

Of course, if the Faculty want to come up with some money to contribute to its admittedly rather large cost, then brilliant. It is an excellent database. Even though it's only been available for a short while we're already get enough hits on it to make the cost about $5/hit which I think would improve over time. But even if we cancelled a fair few journals to pay for it, we'd still be left with no book fund for the next year.

Managing this kind of stuff is probably the part of my job that I like least.