Acquisitions, Budgets, and Material Costs

Issues and Approaches

Sul H Lee

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780866566902
• eBook ISBN: 9781317951179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In times of tight materials budgets, steeply rising prices, and rapidly expanding information formats, library professionals will appreciate the valuable insights into acquisitions processes and management of material costs that are offered in this practical new book. Respected librarians and vendor representatives contributed to this volume--the published proceedings of a recent conference held at the University of Oklahoma. These experts examine approval plans, including a new approach for the publisher-based plan; the impact of inflation, including the increasing costs of titles in selected subject disciplines, causes for the costs, and ramifications for libraries and suppliers; and the process of materials budgeting from the collection of data to the justification of the budget. With increasing demands on librarians to find better budget management strategies and to develop more effective material acquisition processes, an environment has evolved in which librarians and book vendors are forced to examine their methods of acquiring and supplying materials to libraries. Acquisitions, Budgets, and Material Costs: Issues and Approaches provides librarians with readily applicable solutions to today's acquisition problems.

Up the Elevator: An Examination of Approval Plan Inflation and Its Impact on Libraries

Dana Alessi

Item:	“Higher education systems in twenty states … have already been forced to make budget cuts in the midst of the current fiscal year… [SJtates have less money on hand now than they did six years ago.”^1
Item:	“On May 21 the Dallas City Council accepted a 3% cut in the Dallas Public Library budget … In slicing $496,000 from its $16.5 million budget … the library cancelled the purchase of 20,000 books.”^2
Item:	“The University of Texas at Austin will spend 15% ($200,000) less this year than last, partly because of increases in foreign serials subscriptions, the decline of the dollar, and the growing proportion of the budget spent on foreign publications. The reduction reflects an overall cut of $14 million in University spending.”^3
Item:	“[Was 1986] a healthy overall market for trade books? Not really … It sometimes seemed … that more copies were being sold of far fewer books, and that the book business was moving closer to the boom-or-bust mentality of Broadway or the movies … [T]here were signs of shrinkage in the trade business. Macmillan announced heavy future list cutting … and Arbor House also said it would prune its list by nearly 50% within two years.”^4

Peruse any of the current journal literature in higher education, publishing, or librarianship, and one will find similar article after article on shrinking higher education budgets, stagnant or declining library budgets, and a generally lackluster publishing performance. Couple this with articles on soaring journal inflation, differential pricing, and the declining dollar, and the evidence indicates that, to paraphrase, library materials prices are going up by the elevator and library budgets are going up (or, in some cases, down) by the stairs. Clearly, this is not the best of times to be a librarian or, even worse, a library bookseller.

As a book vendor, I am acutely aware of the emphasis increasingly being placed on serials in the average academic library. The Bowker Annual statistics for academic library acquisitions expenditures reflect the decline in the percentage of library materials budgets being spent on books (from 51.7% in 1982-83 to 49% in 1983-84), the corresponding increase in serials budgets (from 37.7% to 39%) and a substantial increase in microform expenditures from 0.9% to 1.6%.⁵

While libraries have committed ever larger chunks of their materials budgets to serials over the past few years, American book title production by and large increased through 1983, although it has been dropping since (Table 1). However, if other approval book vendors have the same experience as Blackwell North America, the number of titles treated on approval plans has grown (Table 2) and although inflation has not been running as rampant as in the early 1980s, nevertheless prices of books have steadily crept upward. Additionally, faculty have not lessened their requests for books.

Thus, librarians face a quandary–how to stretch straining materials

TABLE 1
AMERICAN BOOK TITLE PRODUCTION, 1980-1985
All Hard & Paper

	1980		42377
	1981		48793
	1982		46935
	1983		53380
	1984		51058
	1985		50070

Sources: Bowker Annual and Publishers' Weekly

TABLE 2
TITLES TREATED ON THE BLACKWELL NORTH AMERICA APPROVAL PLAN, 1980–1986 *

	NEW	REPRINT	TOTAL
1979/1980	21626	2009	23635
1980/1981	22413	1724	24137
1981/1982	23827	864	24691
1982/1983	25112	676	25788
1983/1984	26983	819	27802
1984/1985	28528	779	29307
1985/1986	28914	932	29846

* Excludes serial title streated Standing Order Only.

budgets for maximum effectiveness. Publisher-based approval plans are one method to alleviate pressures on the approval budget as well as providing an accurate monitoring tool; approval plans have been under additional scrutiny for subject and non-subject parameter belt-tightening. In addition, librarians have been closely following fluctuations of the dollar and have become much more aware of the value of purchasing titles from country of origin where almost assuredly a better book bargain will result. Book vendors have been pressured to give higher discounts, shrinking their already slim operating margins. Serials lists have been analyzed for possible cancellations, and many libraries have taken a hard line toward placement of new subscriptions and continuations.

Herbert White, for one, has decried the tendency of library administrators to minimize the impact of shrinking materials budgets by cancelling duplicates, ceasing to place new subscriptions and shifting funds from monographs to serials. Shifting funds from monographs to the serials budget, he states,

is a con game, but it is a self-deception. The nonrenewal of serials subscriptions represents a highly visible action. The decision to cut the monographic budgets affects an as-yet-unidentified and even perhaps not-yet-published book. What we don't know can't hurt us. Except, of course, that it does, particularly if applied across the board within the library budget. There are subject disciplines, particularly in the humanities, which are far more dependent on monographs than on serials…. [The] tactic must certainly end some time. If present trends were extended, by 1990 major academic libraries would be buying no new monographs whatsoever.⁶

Although White urged selective cuts, for the most part, libraries are still making cuts across the board on approval plans without always analyzing by subject discipline. It is simply easier to apply one simple general cost-cutting strategy (e.g., cutting the price limit on all approval titles by $10.00) rather than individual subjects due to limited comparative price data. Although the Bowker price statistics can be useful, they do not always represent the materials an academic library buys. There is little other comparative price data available. Indeed, in an article written in 1982, Frederick Lynden pointed out the need for accurate academic materials cost data and the lack of information on prices.⁷

In considering materials costs, inflation, and the impact on libraries, vendors, and publishers, I found several unanswered questions and several ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• About the Editor
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• The Importance of Approval Plans When Budgets Are Lean
• Firstest with the Mostest: Publisher-Based Approval Plans in Academic Libraries
• Analysis of Approval Plans in ARL Libraries
• Up the Elevator: An Examination of Approval Plan Inflation and Its Impact on Libraries
• Projecting Materials Costs: Basis for Effective Decision Making
• Managing Rising Materials Costs
• CD-ROM, Databases, and Other New Information Formats: Their Acquisition
• Acquisitions, Budgets and Materials Costs: A Selected Bibliography
• Index