From: rkenselaar_at_nypl.org
ALA/ALCTS/CMDS
CHIEF COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT OFFICERS OF LARGE RESEARCH LIBRARIES
DISCUSSION GROUP
ANNUAL MEETING
JULY 6, 1996
NEW YORK, N.Y.
(continued from previous message)
5a) Budgeting: Responsibility-Centered Management
Increasingly, our institutions are shifting to responsibility-centered
management (RCM) as the basis of budgeting (a.k.a. tubs on their own
bottoms), in which each school or college in a university has relatively
independent responsibility for its own budget. At Indiana, where RCM is
now in its sixth year, Lynn Smith reported that income generated by a
school, or "responsibility center," goes to the center first, assuring,
for example, funds to cover space, heating, and grounds. The library is
considered a support unit, like the physical plant, with no independent
income stream. Still, the library, like the responsibility centers, is
responsible for paying to cover university-wide endeavors -- $1 million
to the President's office, and $ 2 million to physical plant, for
example.
The library does not charge for its services, but it does have influence
on the assessment charged to other units, which is done by formula.
Each responsibility center pays a tax to cover services and facilities
geared toward the "common good," a term that's widely used. The College
of Arts and Sciences is taxed $14 million for library services, for
example. The Lily Library, although used by a specialized audience, is
considered a facility that contributes to the good of all, and all
centers are taxed for it, whether they use it or not. The formula,
devised by a committee led by a math professor, is incredibly
complicated, but very fair.
At Indiana, implementing RCM brought with it a greater flexibility in
budgeting for the library. They can use surplus funds from their
personal services budget to puchase equipment or supplement the library
materials budget, for example. (And they have been able to uphold the
materials budget's annual 5% increase that has been in place for
decades.) The library has not made any movement to change the library's
status to one of a responsibility center, since it doesn't have an
income stream the way other entities do. RCM has not had an impact on
the status of library staff; their faculty status has come under
question, but not as an outgrowth of RCM. When RCM was initiated, the
business school made a move toward taking over the business library, and
out of the University library administration. While the new budget
context was in part responsible for this, a similar movement had also
been attempted before RCM entered the picture. In one of its most
positive effects, RCM helped the deans of the university get together to
support the library in face of significant budget cuts. On the other
hand, it may have been in part responsible for squashing a proposed
offsite storage facility.
Generally, for RCM to be successful, it's vital to have a strong central
administration. Particularly helpful for the library when RCM was
implemented was that there had been a strong history of faculty support
for the library. Smith considered that implementing RCM could be
difficult in other situations, say at an institution where the library
has not been as highly valued, or there is more of a competitive, less
collegial atmosphere.
Other institutions in the group using RCM include USC, Chicago, Penn,
Duke, UCLA and Michigan. At some institutions, it has increased the
dialogue between the library and academic deans. Generally, though, at
USC, it has had mixed success in comparison to Indiana. There, the
library is not considered a support unit, but an administrative cost
center. A main drawback is the difficulty in getting campus support for
increased funding for anything. Interdisciplinary research tends not to
be supported because it doesn't fit neatly into any slot. The detailed
subject-level accounting the library is forced make at times seems
unavoidably arbitrary. At Chicago, RCM has had an effect of making
greater demands on the library to enhance its support of individual
programs or schools. On the other hand, RCM's effect has been fairly
positive at Duke, where the Dean has said, in effect, "I support the
library because I get value for the money." At Michigan, where it is in
its first year, RCM seems to have brought with it a renewed "customer"
focus; other attempts at fostering Total Quality Management never got
very far before.
5b. Budgeting: Centralization trends.
Increasingly, electronic resources, especially general bibliographic
databases, are being purchased from central funds. A cornerstone of
research library collection development has been the decentralization of
funding, relying on numbers of relatively autonomous selectors. Are
electronic resources leading to increased centralization? Does this
represent a cultural change? Tony Angiletta (Stanford) began discussion
on these questions by pointing out that central funds have always
existed to some extent to cover costs that don't fit neatly elsewhere.
Central funds have been used to cover a variety of costs, such as
resource-based membership fees (e.g., CRL), opportunistic purchases,
resource evaluation, exchange program costs, and contingencies. He
asked if there was any strong evidence that this was truly changing.
Linda Gould has seen evidence of increased centralization at the
University of Washington. There they have set up four centralized
funds, with four network information coordinators covering the
Humanities, Social Sciences, Sciences, and an overall general area which
also includes the arts. Sam Gowan said that at the University of
Florida, he's seen their pooled funding for consorital purchases go up
thousands of dollars over just a few years, and all to cover costs for
electronic resources. On the other hand, there has also been evidence
of decentralization -- at Washington they have also implemented a pilot
document delivery service whereby individual discipline-specific book
funds are charged for the costs for document delivery. Another member
of the group pointed out that electronic resources often require more
cooperative decision-making, involving collection development, public
services and technical staff. At Harvard, Barbara Halporn said they are
working on changing a somewhat elaborate vetting procedure for
purchasing expensive electronic resources which has become something of
a bottleneck. Members of the group felt it was important to keep
individual selectors involved in the decision making process for
expensive electronic resources.
Tony Ferguson wondered whether shifting the focus of decision-making
might result in ending up with materials in several different formats:
a print version selected by a subject selector, a CD-ROM purchased by
selector specializing in electronic formats, and a networked version
selected by a central group. He also mentioned that there seems to be a
trend in journals published by academic presses to cover several
different disciplines -- another cause of a trend toward centralized
funding for libraries.
5c) Budgeting: Objective Allocation Criteria.
Linda Gould described her experience at the University of Washington,
where they have allocated 40% of the library materials budget using a
formula, and 60% by other traditional methods. These methods include a
survey of selectors, and consideration of historical expenditure trends.
Generally, few research libraries make use of allocation formulas, and
implementing one at Washington was more of an outgrowth of an effort to
use objective criteria, and not a concerted effort to develop a formula
as such. Elements considered in the formula include the number of
faculty and students, types of degrees offered, and circulation rates
among the various disciplines. The areas that are subject to the
formula include general research collections in science, social science,
fine arts and the humanities; excluded are undergraduate collections,
general reference, and special collections.
Gould supported the idea of utilizing more objective criteria, saying
that we need to be more accountable, and it seemed that past methods
were inadequate. But then, she found that she questioned some of the
statistical data used in developing their formula. For example, some
units circulate periodicals, and others don't. This makes it difficult
to identify objective, comparable data. She wondered if a formula could
truly be much more reliable than the historical approach. An
alternative might be to give more consideration to statistical data in
combination with historical methods, but not to use an inflexible
allocation formula per se. She wondered if it might be possible to
develop an inter-institutional "index of library dependency," including
circulation data and interlibrary loan requests, something like the ARL
index, and eventually to come up with system that relates to LC
classification.
At Washington, they assumed when they were developing the formula that
some fields were overfunded and some underfunded; the formula showed
that the social sciences fell in the latter category. Implementing the
formula made a lot of people happy, but some very unhappy. A member of
the group pointed out that researchers in different disciplines have
different types of needs. In the social sciences, for example, we would
expect that a smaller number of core materials would be used by a wide
group of researchers, while in the humanities, we would expect
individual researchers to rely on a greater number of resources.
JOINT MEETING WITH COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT LIBRARIANS OF ACADEMIC
LIBRARIES DISCUSSION GROUP
John Haar (Vanderbilt), Chair
1) Introduction.
John Haar, Chair of the Collection Development Librarians of Academic
Libraries Discussion Group began the meeting with a reminder about his
group's afternoon meeting, focusing on organizational restructuring and
the future of collection development.
Written reports from the Association of Research Libraries, the Center
for Research Libraries, and the Library of Congress were distributed in
advance of the meeting on the listserv, COLLDV-L. There was no report
at the meeting from a representative of ARL; Jutta Reed-Scott retired
recently, and Mary Case, her replacement, had not yet started in her new
position.
2) Center for Research Libraries.
Susan Rabe reported that CRL is planning a symposium on foreign
newspapers, which have been the focus of several past preservation
projects (CAMP, LAMP, etc.). The symposium would address access to
these materials and involve faculty, publishers, vendors, and
librarians.
CRL is installing a circulation system that incorporates bar codes,
emphasizing monograph collections first. They are testing
patron-initiated borrowing, using the Ohiolink system, and are very
interested in gathering usage statistics from the system.
A new group, the Collections and Services Advisory Panel, chaired by
Linda Gould, has replaced individual panels on collections,
preservation, and bibliographic access. It will provide input on
management of the Center across all operations.
CRL recently gave a presentation to ARL directors on its study on
"Global Information." CRL President Don Simpson will provide further
information on this through the group's listserv (COLLDV-L) before
Midwinter.
A CRL task force is investigating state documents collections, which
number over a million items. They are looking at processing needs and
costs, and are also taking under consideration the possibility of
discarding materials. They have studied a sample, including materials
from Alabama, Maine, Michigan and Montana. They have searched OCLC for
cataloging copy and holdings information on serials and monographs.
Results have varied according to state. Libraries in Montana use WLN,
and do not load records into OCLC. In Maine, there are few research
libraries, and little recon work has been done on state documents.
Generally, though, they have found more records in OCLC than they
expected, largely a result of significant recon projects over last 10
years. Some major state documents collections, such as those at NYPL,
have not been reconned.
3) Library of Congress.
Bill Schenck began by expressing interest in CRL's foreign newspapers
symposium. Two years ago, LC conducted a cancellation project involving
these materials, which raised some concerns. LC has placed a renewed
focus on area studies collections, bringing staff together
administratively in one group. They are planning an international
symposium on area studies, concentrating on collections at LC, with
participation from overseas faculty and librarians. They anticipate
publishing the proceedings.
LC is seeking to gather more and better internal statistical management
data. They are developing an integrated library system to replace local
systems. He asked members of the group to share examples of significant
data gathering with him. There are basically two arguments that can be
made to Congress to justify budget increases: a rise in inflation, and
an increase in workload. It's easy to document rising inflation costs,
but documenting an increased workload -- whether through increased
scholarly publishing in the world or the impact of electronic resources
-- is a problem. Still, they are pleased with LC's 1998 budget approved
by Congress.
A management study, mandated by Congress, has been completed by the
Government Accounting Office, and includes many recommendations. One
recommendation was for the Library to change its mission and become more
of a resource-locator, and to stop wide-ranging, international
collecting. (Resource sharing, as such, was not included in their
recommendations.) LC considered the GAO recommendations extreme, and in
violation of their long-standing mission; Congress supported LC's
position.
Plans for a West Africa field office are being reconsidered, although LC
is still planning to develop an increased presence in the area, possibly
through another existing bibliographic agency. Expanded coverage of the
area may result from making modifications in the funding of the LC
office in East Africa.
The Government Printing Office is moving strongly to electronic format,
and is no longer providing LC depository copies for use in exchange
relationships. Ironically, for some titles, LC has to purchase
congressional publications.
The meeting was adjourned at 12:10 pm.
Heike Kordish
Bob Kenselaar
1/10/97
Received on Wed Jan 22 1997 - 18:02:55 EST