Dear colleagues,
Primarily because of the difficulty in budgeting continuing funds for standing orders, UNC Chapel Hill has striven to acquire many standing order materials through other means.
When my library budgets for standing orders on continuing funds, we base our projected expenditures on the last two years' worth of payments on a given fund. Due to a downturn in publishing of monographs in series, this led to serious over-budgeting and left us wondering why we weren't spending all of our standing order money. Also, because of this budgeting structure, any standing order we haven't paid in two years (because nothing came in) gets canceled automatically and its funds are not transferred into the new subscriptions line. These factors have made it difficult on both our Accounting staff and selectors.
To handle irregular, infrequent standing orders, we have established procedures for spending one-time funding on them, which we call "pseudo standing orders." We maintain a standing order with our vendors, assign a monographic fund to each of these titles, and-if the fund is already fully encumbered-query the selector for another fund when a new volume arrives. This ensures we continue to get the resources we need that are best acquired via standing order, but which resources don't fit our budget practices. Collected works of composers are a great example of this kind of title, because they're often published out of sequence, with no predictable pattern that would enable standing order budgeting.
We have also moved a lot of standing orders to our approval plan processes: we tell vendors to send every volume on that series via our approval plans. Alternatively, some standing orders have been moved to notifications: we tell the vendors to notify us automatically when a new volume comes out and we have the choice whether or not to purchase it. Recently, we've established practices that allow for any standing orders moved to approval to have the funding behind those titles applied to the approval plan budgets away from the standing orders funds. Vendors cannot always provide this service for a given series. For example, a vendor may be able to handle it on standing order, but they don't profile the series for approval. Therefore we always check with the vendor before making this move.
Stephen
Stephen M. Brooks, MLIS
Head, Monographic Services Dept.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
PO Box 8890
CB #3902, Davis Library
Chapel Hill, NC 27515-8890
919-962-1128 (voice)
919-962-4450 (fax)
stephen_brooks_at_unc.edu<mailto:stephen_brooks_at_unc.edu>
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Received on Tue Apr 23 2013 - 15:27:30 EDT