Collection Development: Budget, Statistics, or

Intuition?Mark FunkMAHSLINApril 25, 2002

Why CD Is Like Sex

• Everybody generally knows how

• Everybody does it differently

• Don’t know how anybody else does it

• …unless you do it with them

• But, most people do it by themselves

Tacit Knowledge

Tacit Knowledge

Information that has not been, and perhaps cannot be, formulated completely explicitly and therefore cannot effectively be stored or transferred entirely by impersonal means.

Donald McKenzie

Budget Considerations

• Track accounts’ monthly totals

• Keep previous years’ spending summaries

• Track “big-ticket” items

Track Accounts MonthlyEbsco Majors S.O. Matthews Total

March $1,770.96 $2,430.35 $6,963.40 $11,164.71

April $1,126.90 $472.40 $6,174.02 $7,773.32

May $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00

June $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00

Spent $598,644.17 $14,084.66 $67,268.18 $679,997.01

Budget $600,000.00 $20,000.00 $80,000.00 $700,000.00

Remain $1,355.83 $5,915.34 $12,731.82 $20,002.99

Previous Years to Compare

Majors

S.O.01/02 00/01 99/00 98/99

April $ 436.93 $0.00 $80.88

May $2,584.98 $2,857.18 $1,1481.13

June $955.97 $3,355.27 $3,388.95

Total $18,722.31 $18,803.13 $18,820.03

Track “Big-Ticket” Items

• Before: annual journal renewal our only big-ticket

• Now: many resources are due throughout the year.

• Don’t be caught unaware of expensive renewals.

Track “Big-Ticket” Items

Cell Press $8,200 July

STAT!Ref $10,000 September

Micromedex $9,500 December

Ovid $42,000 February

Academic IDEAL $57,000 March

Science Direct $13,000 March

Budget Stretching

• Early payment options for serials

• Resource sharing

Early Payment Options: 2002

Approximate Date Ebsco Harrassowitz

(>100K Euros)

Prior to June 1.0% 3.5%

June .8% 3.0%

July .6% 2.5%

August .4% 2.0%

September .2% 1.5%

Resource Sharing:Current

Shared Resources

• Web of Science• Current Contents• ScienceDirect• Academic IDEAL• STAT!Ref• MD Consult• Micromedex• Cell Press journals

• Blackwell Synergy• Kluwer journals• SciFinder Scholar• Current Protocols• Nature journals• Science• ProQuest• Thieme journals

Resource Sharing: Future

Statistics

• Circulation and in-house usage

• ILL requests• Whacking statistics

Circulation Statistics

• Only 20–25% of uses of print journals are reported

• Readers will reshelf journals

• Multiple articles per journal volume

Online Journal “Hits”

• Some publishers won’t release data

• All uses are counted as “hits”– Double-clicking is two hits– Reload button is a hit– Back and Forward buttons are hits– IE will make multiple requests for a file,

even with one click

Track ILL Requests Annually

Journal 00/

01

99/

00

98/

99

97/

98

96/

97

Acta Ophthal Scand

4 6

Epilepsy

Research

5 7

J Medical Microbiology

5 3 11

Whacking Statistics

• Statistics to whack your administrator over the head with.

• Get his/her attention.• Play on his/her guilt,

self-esteem, etc.• All’s fair…

Uh-oh…

Get It At Staples!

Maryland Whack

Cornell’s Peer Institutions

• Case Western Reserve

• Columbia• Duke• Harvard• Johns Hopkins• Stanford• University of

Chicago

• University of Pennsylvania

• University of Pittsburgh

• University of Rochester

• Washington University

• Yale

Collection Expenditures 1993

$0 $200 $400 $600 $800 $1,000 $1,200

Cornell

U of Rochester

Stanford

Case Western

Harvard

Yale

U of Pennsylvania

U of Pittsburgh

Washington U

U of Chicago

Duke

Johns Hopkins

Columbia

(thousands)

Collection Expenditures 1994

$0 $200 $400 $600 $800 $1,000 $1,200 $1,400

Cornell

U of Rochester

Stanford

Case Western

Yale

U of Pennsylvania

Harvard

Washington U

Johns Hopkins

U of Chicago

Duke

U of Pittsburgh

Columbia

(thousands)

Collection Expenditures 1995

$0 $200 $400 $600 $800 $1,000 $1,200 $1,400

Cornell

U of Rochester

Case Western

Yale

Stanford

U of Pennsylvania

Harvard

Washington U

Johns Hopkins

Duke

U of Chicago

U of Pittsburgh

Columbia

(thousands)

Collection Expenditures 1996

$0 $200 $400 $600 $800 $1,000 $1,200 $1,400

U of Rochester

Cornell

Case Western

Stanford

Johns Hopkins

Yale

Harvard

Duke

Washington U

U of Pennsylvania

U of Chicago

U of Pittsburgh

Columbia

(thousands)

Collection Expenditures 1997

$0 $200 $400 $600 $800 $1,000 $1,200 $1,400 $1,600

U of Rochester

Case Western

Cornell

Johns Hopkins

Stanford

Yale

Harvard

U of Pennsylvania

Washington U

U of Chicago

Duke

U of Pittsburgh

Columbia

(thousands)

Intuition

The great question, which I have not been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What do women want?’

Sigmund Freud, PsychiatristCollection Development Librarian

users

Assessing Users’ Needs

• Laws of Collection Development:– Heavy ILL requests seldom turn into

journal purchase requests.– Requests for a journal “I need all the time”

seldom show up in ILL statistics.

• How patrons use the collection can tell you what they want.

• Success breeds success.

Assessing Users’ Needs, Pt. 2

• How patrons don’t use the collection can tell you what they don’t want.

Weeding As Post-Mortem

• Why did this item fail? Was it:– Author?– Publisher?– Format?– Quality?– Subject?– Level?

In General, Our Users Avoid:

• Yearbooks of…

• Monographic proceedings of meetings

• Recent Advances in…

• Controversies in…

• Government documents

• Non–U.S. books (unless standard or unique)

What The Future Holds

• Things changing rapidly

• “Ad hoc” decisions, based on little to no experience

• Big question is electronic access

QuickTime™ and a decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

St. Egad the Persecuted

• Patron saint of collection development librarians.

• Worked in a monastery library in Spain, 16th century.

• Persecuted by evil publisher from Amsterdam known only by his Spanish nickname of…

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana