From: William Monroe <William_Monroe_at_brown.edu>
I would like to get some idea how academics libraries
budget for shelf-ready books, or even for general approval
plans.
At Brown, we make allocations for each discipline for
our general domestic approval plan, and track expenditures.
This allows us to report on level of support for different
programs in the university. The assignment of funds to
particular titles, however, is done by selectors at the
approval shelves. As we begin profiling to receive at least
some of these books shelf-ready, the question has arisen
as to how we might track these expenditures.
I know that some libraries make a large allocation for
approvals that is not tracked by discipline, but simply
considered a "general expenditure". How does this work
for reporting support of individual programs? Are there
other ways that university libraries track such expenditures?
William S. Monroe
Brown University Library
==1==
From: "Judith F Niles" <judith.niles_at_louisville.edu>
For the University of Louisville Libraries, we track approval
expenditures by discipline, just as for firm order expenditures.
Our system is Voyager, in which we create a separate ledger for
the approval account, and add reporting funds for each discipline
we want to track. We also have many separate endowment and gift
accounts we track in the same way. We can later extract reports
compiling ALL expenditures for each discipline.
To put that into context, the environment here has some distinct
differences from many other academic libraries, such as:
* Faculty here have never been selectors of approval books
* Librarians who are liaisons to academic units develop the approval
profiles for the various subject areas.
* When our return percentage fell to less than five percent of
the total plan, we switched to shelf ready service for both
approvals and and firm orders.
* Some years ago we stopped "allocating" to each academic unit. We
just track expenditures from faculty requests, approval plans and
internal selection activities. The total expenditures figures are
always much more than what we might have allocated, and that
information is available to the faculty through the libraries' web site.
If anyone wants further information, please contact me at the address
below.
Judith Niles
Director of Collection Management
University of Louisville Libraries
Ekstrom Library G41
Louisville KY 40292
==2==
From:
David Marshall <marshald_at_georgetown.edu>
As part of our shelf-ready processing at Georgetown, fund codes
are linked to our approval subject profiles which are then
assigned by our vendors (both Blackwell and Yankee do this
for us) to the individual title records. Generally this
works very well and we do get the budget
broken down by subject funds without human intervention.
From random checks over the last few years, the number of
titles that a selector may have assigned differently are not
significant enough to warrant reviewing the receipts for
fund code changes.
David L. Marshall
Head of Acquisitions and Serials
Georgetown University Library
Washington, DC 20057-1174
Received on Thu May 01 2003 - 15:11:01 EDT