Yes – I agree. Whoever is responsible for collection
development needs to help you reshape collection.
·
First try to get print reviewed for cancellation / move
aggressively to electronic only depending on criteria of your institution.
·
Change remaining print material to limited retention if
appropriate. Storage also costs money and a lot of material is not needed
after the first year or two.
·
Dropping check in may also be tied to your organization.
If material is routed into different collections you may need to consult
records for instructions so hitting the received key may not be a big
deal.
·
Code records to eliminate claiming for some titles. You
need to decide which title warrant claiming. Initial automated claim may
not take a lot of time. Follow up to problems is what soaks up resources.
·
Bindery decisions can be tied to the kind of Storage and retrieval
system you have – I don’t believe one approach fits all
titles or all institutions.
Prints serials should not all have the same treatment –
any more than books do. It may take some time to reshape
collection. Good luck.
Diane
P.S. Electronic products give us similar staffing
concerns. I have seen a lot of time devoted to getting access to a
marginal title. That probably is not a good allocation of resources either.
But dealing with that does not seem to have the appeal of the “drop
check in” idea as a source of staffing.
From: SERIALST: Serials
in Libraries Discussion Forum [mailto:SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU] On Behalf Of Fred
Jenkins
Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 3:18 PM
To: SERIALST@LIST.UVM.EDU
Subject: Re: [SERIALST] Cease claiming, checking in, binding
Of course,
there is a corollary that we are all dancing around here. If a particular
print title is no longer of enough value that you care if it came in or not,
why are you still subscribing?
Fred W.
Jenkins, Ph.D.
Associate Dean for Collections & Operations
& Professor
University of Dayton Libraries
106A Roesch Library
(937) 229-4272
300 College Park
(937) 229-4215 (fax)
Dayton, OH 45469-1360
|
Rick
Anderson <rick.anderson@UTAH.EDU> 01/19/10
12:03 PM
|
|
> Your direct labor costs can be readily
measured. Your opportunity cost is
> obscure.
One of the standard mistakes we make in libraries, IMHO, is that we measure
what's easy to measure and ignore what's hard to measure, even when what's
hard to measure is more important. I would suggest that direct labor
costs
-- though easily measurable -- are much less important than opportunity
cost, which may not be measurable in exact units but can be enormous.
I
don't have to be able to measure opportunity cost in units to know that one
staff-hour spent on print management is a staff-hour not spent on
online-resource management. At my institution, usage of printed
materials
has been falling rapidly for more than a decade, while usage of online
materials has been skyrocketing over the same period. If (as I do) I
consider control to be a means to the end of patron service rather than an
end in itself, then I should probably consider sacrificing some control of
low-use print in favor of greater control of high-use online. But
that's me
and my institution. Your mileage may vary.
> Your aggregate investment in man-hours will decline as your portfolio
of
> subscriptions declines. There are not any sunk costs
associated with the mere
> adoption of the procedure.
You're right. The cost associated with the adoption of any procedure
is
almost entirely opportunity cost. See above.
> Not remarking issues as they arrive and failing to make periodic
complaints to
> your agency over issues not delivered is an indication that you have,
in a
> rough-and-ready way, elected to write-off part of the inventory for
which you
> have paid.
That's technically correct, but misleadingly phrased. To put it more
accurately: I cease traditional check-in and claiming practices if I
determine that those practices have an insufficient impact on patron
service
to justify them, especially when higher-impact activities are waiting in
the
wings. Traditional claiming has a real-world impact on far fewer
issues
than are actually claimed (it has no impact on those that would come
whether
claimed or not, and none on those that will never come regardless of
claims). Check-in creates records that have little or no real-world
impact
on patron access (the fact, for example, that an issue has arrived doesn't
help a patron if the issue isn't on the shelf). The creation of
meaningless
and low-impact records would impose no meaningful opportunity cost if
higher-impact tasks were not available for staff to do. But, in my
library's case anyway, they are. That's the argument for doing away
with
check-in -- not that check-in isn't valuable, but that it isn't valuable
enough.
--
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library
Univ. of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu
(801) 721-1687