The mean price of the 118 serials recommended for subscription was $693.92, and their mean faculty score was 45.1. In contrast, the mean price of the 342 serials recommended for cancellation—$650.32— was almost the same, but their mean faculty score of 3.9 was far lower. Given this lack of relationship of cost to ST value, the outcome of the exercise was predictable. To summarize, the purpose of the exercise was to determine whether the ST serials holdings of LSU Libraries could be brought up to 75% of the ST value perceived by the LSU faculty in the desired universe of serials with the resources available in the working universe of serials, i.e., all those serials on subscription at LSU Libraries in the 33 curriculum cores with the addition of those highly ranked serials that were not on subscription but that accounted for 75% of value perceived by the LSU faculty within the desired universe of these cores. Due to the faults inherent in such expert ratings, the perceptions of the LSU faculty had to be corrected by citation and use measures. For the purpose of the exercise, a measure called "trade-off" was constructed. This was done by simply subtracting the cancellation measures in terms of titles, faculty score, and costs from their equivalent overall new subscription measures to gauge the results of eliminating the cancellations from the working universe while retaining the new subscriptions in it. The percentage relationships of the trade-offs were calculated with respect to the working universe both as a totality and on an average core-by-core basis.

Concerning titles, 118 were recommended for new subscription, whereas 342 were recommended for cancellation. The net title trade-off was therefore a reduction of the working universe by 224 titles. With respect to the 1,619 titles comprising the working universe, the net reduction was 13.83%. As a percentage of their respective core titles, the trade-off titles ranged from -53.8% in Biological and Agricultural Engineering to +38.5% in Climatology with a mean of -11.6% for all 33 curriculum cores.

As for faculty score, the 118 new subscriptions had an aggregate faculty score of 5,320, whereas the 342 cancellations had an aggregate faculty score of 1,334. The net faculty score trade-off, therefore, was an increase of the working universe faculty score by 3,986. With respect to the total working universe faculty score of 46,593, this represented a net gain of 8.56%. As percentages of the faculty score of their respective cores, the faculty score trade-offs ranged from -12.5% in Biological and Agricultural Engineering to +59.2% in Climatology with a mean of +13.5% for the 33 curriculum cores.

And, finally, with regard to costs, the 118 new subscriptions cost $81,882, whereas the cancellations had a cost of $222,409. The net cost trade-off was therefore a reduction of the cost of the working universe by $140,527. With respect to the total cost of the working universe of $1,049,805, this represents a net reduction of 13.39%. As percentages of the costs of their respective core, the cost trade-offs ranged from -80.0% in General Science to +58.6% in Human Nutrition & Food with a mean of -13.0% for all 33 curriculum cores.

All in all, the inference that must be drawn from the results of this exercise is obvious. Despite the cancellation of 2,207 titles and the institution of the policy of adding no new subscriptions during the period 1986–94 in the face of an exponentially growing serials population, the ST serials holdings of LSU Libraries emerged relatively unscathed from the debacle. Instead of the hundreds of new subscriptions one might expect would be needed to bring these holdings up to 75% of the ST value perceived by the LSU faculty in the universe of serials desired by them in the 33 curriculum cores, only 118 were required, and much of the benefit of these 118 new subscriptions came from the 53 high faculty score serials. The 65 mid-faculty score serials were already approaching marginality in terms of leverage. Moreover, not only were relatively few new subscriptions required to bring the ST serials holdings in the 33 cores up to the optimal level of the value perceived by the LSU faculty, there still remained hundreds of serials in these cores that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and could be canceled at minimal loss in perceived ST value.

These results can be attributed not only to the careful management of the cancellations during the crisis but also to the highly skewed and stable nature of the ST journal system. In essence, the commanding heights of the ST serials holding of LSU Libraries were for the most part still intact, and the results of the exercise would have been even more favorable in terms of trade-offs had these commanding heights suffered major damage.

To verify this, the leverage in terms of LSU faculty score was calculated for a sample of 25 of the 50 most-often cited journals in 1989 and 1994, as identified by Garfield (1996). This sample was constructed by moving down the list in descending rank order of total 1994 citations and selecting those journals that were in the serials set under investigation until the desired number had been reached The titles were located in nine curriculum cores, and they included numerous prestigious journals, such as American Journal of Physiology, Astrophysical Journal, Cell, Journal of Geophysical Research, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Physical Review, and Science. With rare exception all were still on subscription at LSU Libraries. The mean leverage of these titles was 5.55 to 1, which was 3.6 times more than the 1.55-to-1 total leverage of the high faculty score new subscriptions, 3.8 times more than the 1.46-to-1 total leverage of the overall new subscriptions, 4.0 times more the 1.38-to-1 total leverage of the mid-faculty score new subscriptions, and 42.7 times more than the 0.13-to-1 total leverage of the cancellations.