My library has for years had departmental allocations that are apportioned according to a formula. Each departmental fund is meant to cover both monographs and serials, with the resulting problems for many departments (especially in the sciences) of maxing out their budgets almost every year because of journal inflation and thereby having to cut titles. Departments have a great deal of input into what journals we keep. I'm interested in moving to a different model where all serials are on one fund, and cancellations are based more on usage.
However, since our formula is based partially on average cost of a serial in a given discipline and size of the literature in that field, this would necessitate changing our formula to reflect something similar for monographs. Average cost of monographs in different disciplines seems easy enough to find; but I'm wondering how to capture the "size of the literature" part. It seems that a more important factor for monographs is the relative importance of monographs to the discipline, but I doubt whether that is quantifiable.
Has anyone else developed the sort of formula I'm talking about here, or can otherwise direct me in pulling this together? I'm still a novice collection development librarian and am possibly overthinking all this. Any advice is welcome.
Thanks,
Jeff Purdue
Collection Development Librarian
Western Washington University
516 High Street
Bellingham, WA 98225-9103
Jeff.Purdue_at_wwu.edu
(360) 650-7750
(360) 650-3954 (fax)
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Received on Tue Apr 06 2010 - 12:43:58 EDT