From: Lou Vyhnanek <louv_at_wsu.edu>
I submitted a request toward the end of October regarding allocation
formulas or criteria for allocating money for purchasing monographs. I
received a number of responses and requests that I forward these responses
to the list. I am including them in this e-mail, making it rather lengthy. Lou.
Allocation formulas in academic libraries / compiled by Jane H. Tuten [and]
Beverly Jones
Chicago, IL : Association of College and Research Libraries, American
Library Association, c1995
Lou,
If you haven't seen this book yet, it would be worth a look. We have been
working on an allocation formula here, but one that would address both
monographs and continuations. The cite that is listed above looks at
formulas only for books, though, but it has some good models in it.
Judith
Judith Brink, Head of Collection Development
Dimond Library
University of New Hampshire
Durham, New Hampshire 03824
Judith.Brink_at_unh.edu
603-862-4513
A thought for you—even though we’re much smaller than you are. We used a
formula for years. The only number that matters is the first one you put
in—the beginning amount that the formula operates on.
No matter how hard to you try to come up with something equitable, people
will who want more money will complain about every aspect of the weighting.
However, as soon as they have receive enough money to buy what they want to
buy, they totally lose interest in the formula. Unfortunately, that
allocation is the one number you probably have little control over.
To paraphrase: Formulas are Fiction Agreed Upon.
Good luck.
Marvin Guilfoyle
Acquisitions & Collection Development Librarian
University of Evansville Libraries
(812) 479-2247
Hi Lou,
We had a formula at Texas Tech when I was there and I was on a committee
that tweaked it one year. I think the population at TTU and budget were
pretty comparable to yours-- you can get the budget figures from the stats
at arl.org. We derived the allocations in these stages:
1. BNA inventory for the past year, aka "the universe of publications"
2. establish the dollar figure for each subject corresponding to a fund
based on call numbers assigned to the books by BNA
3. subtract from each fund's amount the dollar amt recd on last year's AP
4. factor this amount by faculty, student population of the subject's
department
5. factor this amount by circulation of the subject's books in the past year
6. determine the relative share of each subject for the resulting totals
7. from the available book money, assign to each fund the corresponding %
derived in number 6.
I probably have a document somewhere describing this more precisely; let me
know if you want it and I can track it down. I made out well in this system
because colleagues were willing to "cede" me portions of the Js and Hs for
history, and history books circulated a lot. Best of all IMHO was the
built-in incentive to buy books that circulate, and through your reference
and instruction work encourage their use. The obvious weakness of this
formula is there were very few foreign language publications in the
universe, but somehow this didn't hurt me because the resultant allocations
were quite adequate for foreign language ordering too.
Jim
James P. Niessen E-mail: niessen_at_rci.rutgers.edu
World History Librarian Phone: 732-932-7129 x136
Alexander Library - Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1169 Fax: 732-932-1101
We are a smaller institution than yours, but I can send you the
allocation formula that we are currently using (but also revising).
Are you familiar with an ALA Clip Notes publication on this topic?
Title Allocation formulas in academic libraries / compiled by Jane H.
Tuten, Beverly Jones.
Imprint Chicago : College Library Information Packet Committee, College
Libraries Section, Association of College and Research Libraries, c1995.
Here is our formula:
University of Winnipeg Library Fund Allocation Formula
Ed + Cd + Fd
__ __ __ x 100 = Q
Eu + Cu + Fa
_____________________________
3
Ed = number of full course enrollments (FCE) in the dept.
Eu = total university FCE
Cd = number of full courses offered by the dept.
Cu = total university full courses
Fd = number of faculty members in the dept.
Fa = total university faculty members
Q = % of the total global acquisitions budget to be allotted to the
dept.
The weightings are allocated as follows:
Course Levels Non-lab With
Lab*
Enrollment 1000, 2000,
3000 1 2
4000 2 4
Courses 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000 1 2
* "Lab" means a minimum 3-hour lab in either Physics, Chemistry or
Biology.
There are some additional correctives that have to be applied,
however:
1. There is a "science tax" (approx. 7%) of the initial global
acquisitions budget that is removed and re-applied to the science
departments (Biology, Chemistry, Physics). This helps to offset the
high cost of academic publications in the sciences.
2. No science department's allocation will fall below the amount
the department would have received in 1987, using the formula (for
example, if the enrollment in a department dropped considerably).
3. Approx. 80% of the total acquisitions budget is covered by this
formula. The other 20% is reserved for the purchase of general
periodicals, reference books, and a few other special categories
(Collegiate Grades 11 and 12; the Faculty of Theology).
4. To compensate for the inter-disciplinary departments, where few
courses are listed specifically under the inter-disciplinary name and
where the formula would yield very little, a special augmenting grant
(to be shifted from the global acquisitions budget to the
inter-disciplinary dept.) was agreed upon by the committee.
23 April 2003; originally written 1987
**************
Linwood DeLong
Reference Coordinator
University of Winnipeg Library
515 Portage Ave.
Winnipeg, MB, Canada
R3B 2E9
Ph. (204) 786-9124
FAX (204) 786-1824
e-mail: linwood.delong_at_uwinnipeg.ca
Lou:
As I'm sure you are aware there are a number of method to use in deriving
formulas. We have experimented a bit in analyzing the number of classes,
instructed, degrees offered, average cost of material, and so forth.
What we have actually used for the past two years is an aggregate of the
number of undergraduate majors, grad majors, undergrad non-majors, grad non-
majors and faculty within disciplines. While it may seem fair to allocate
using cost of material, the dilemma is it can disadvantage various colleges
and departments who are responsible for teaching a large number of students
(e.g., the fine arts and humanities) and need library support.
I hope this helps.
Leslie Button
Associate Director for Collection Services
W.E.B. Du Bois Library
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003-9275
button_at_library.umass.edu
Lou,
We reallocated our approx. $1 mill monograph budget (all disciplines) 4
years ago. We spent an entire semester evaluating the literature on the
subject. I gave a presentation on our experience to the State University of
New York Library Association which I have attached if you are interested .
Edward Shephard
Collection Development Officer
Glenn G. Bartle Library
Binghamton University
P.O. Box 6012
Binghamton NY 13902-6012
Ph: 607-777-2493
Fax: 607-777-4848
mailto:eshephar_at_binghamton.edu
Lou,
At Bowling Green State Univ., in FY2003-04 we re-vamped our firm-order
monograph allocations and began to use a formula. Our formula is based on
four factors: student credit hours, cost of books, circulation, approval
plan support. For student credit hours we use 15th day enrollment data
gathered by the Office of Institutional research. We count enrollment in
300 and 400 level undergrad courses and total the raw credit hour number
for each dept. Grad credit hours are weighted: Masters credit hours are
multiplied by 5; PhD, by 10. Cost of books in the discipline is based on
our major vendor data. Approval plan coverage is based approval
expenditures by dept. Circulation data by LC is mapped to dept. fund codes
and totalled. We use 3 years of circ. data to even out peaks and valleys --
again using LC class mapped to dept. fund codes.
BGSU has approx. 21,000 students in all - humanities, social sciences, and
sciences. We do not support a med school or law school.
If you have further questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.
Regards,
--L.
Linda A. Brown
Coordinator of Collections
Associate Professor
University Libraries
1001 E. Wooster
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, Ohio 43403
Voice: 419-372-7894
Fax: 419-372-7996
lbrown_at_bgnet.bgsu.edu
Dear Lou,
Your message below caught my eye, as we are now looking more closely at a
variety of ways to measure campus needs, as part of a larger programmatic
review of library collections and services. I would be very interested in
comments you receive, which might be shared. The reading I've done, long
ago now, and comments from colleagues here who have worked in other
libraries, suggest to me that allocation formulas risk being too
mechanical. We need to balance our ability to respond quickly to emerging
campus needs, with our mission to build strong core collections for
long-term use.
We have not arrived at any formula -- in fact, I suspect there would be an
uproar if we did. But we are looking at things like:
1. use (circulation and ILL), by affiliation of user, and by subject;
frankly, we're not quite sure what to make of use of electronic resources,
as they don't fit neatly into our usual subject/user categories; circ can
include things like no./% of titles added to the collection in the last
[x] years, which have/have not circulated [x] times.
2. size of campus constituencies -- faculty and students, esp. graduate
students (data primarily from central campus offices)
3. review of campus programmatic initiatives and trends (part of a general
environmental scan conducted by our Lib. Admin.).
4. price of materials (by subject) -- I think more from vendor data and
industry trends, than from internal data, which we have but which is often
difficult to interpret.
5. changing disciplinary needs (based largely on comments from our subject
specialist librarians)
6. possibly some attention to ranking or "prestige" of particular
programs, though defining this would be contentious.
7. there is some (small) interest here in comparative data on growth in
collections, in particular subject areas, e.g. as provided by the North
American Title Count.
I doubt that any of this is really helpful to you, but do wish you luck
figuring out what's right for WSU. I'm also curious about how you
determine allocations for serials...or the balance between serials (which
would include most of your e-resources?) and monographs.
Yours,
Bryan Skib
Coordinator of Graduate Library Collections
209 Hatcher Library
University of Michigan
P.S. GL holds our main humanities and social science collections.
Lou,
We have a rather complicated formula here at Texas A&M International
University which has finally satisfied faculty. We divide most of our book
budget among the teaching faculty by what we call "academic unit." The
College of Arts and Sciences has six departments: Behavioral & Applied
Social Sciences, Biology & Chemistry, Fine & Performing Arts, Language &
Literature, Mathematical & Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences. The
College of Business and the College of Education have three departments
each, but they are so cross-disciplinary that we treat them as two single
"units." There is also an independent School of Nursing, making a total of
nine units.
The formula has four items, three of which have multiple components. The
first item is enrollment and curriculum. For each unit, we count semester
credit hours from the previous academic year. Then we count the courses
offered in the catalog and weight each course as fifty semester credit
hours. Graduate hours and courses are multiplied by three for weighting
purposes (so a graduate course would count for 150 semester credit hours).
Then the numbers are added up and each unit's total is divided by the grand
total, making percentages that add up to 1.0. The second item is
circulation and ILL. We print out the end-of-year report from the previous
year of book circulations by LC classification (NATC divisions). We have
assigned appropriate parts of the LC classification to different units
(some are unassigned and left out of the calculation, such as
classification A). We add up the book circulations for each unit. Then we
go through the book ILL requests and divided them up by the same LC
classification division system - each ILL request counts as ten book
circulations. Again, all the numbers are added up, divided by the grand
total, and rendered as percentages.
The third item is books x cost. We take the North American Academic Books
figures by subject from the Bowker Annual and add up the latest three years
for each unit. Then we multiply each subject area's total by the most
recent average cost figure for that subject (given on the same table in the
Bowker Annual). All subjects assigned to each unit are added up and then
the totals are added together and turned into percentages as above. The
fourth item is library book holdings. We print out the current holdings
report by LC classification (NATC division) and add up the holdings for
each unit, then add the totals and create percentages. Then for each unit
we add the percentages from items one, two, and three, and subtract the
percentage from item four, then divide by two. This leaves us with a final
list of percentages which adds up to 1.0, and we assign the book budget
according to those percentages.
jmaxstadt_at_tamiu.edu
--
Lou Vyhnanek
Humanities/Social Sciences Collection Development Manager
and History Subject Specialist
Holland/New Library
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-5610
Phone: (509)335-8860
Fax: (509)335-1889
E-mail: louv_at_wsu.edu
Received on Tue Dec 07 2004 - 14:06:41 EST