Prepared by Robert G. Sewell

Source of Funds

This category refers to the sources from which the various components of the budget are constructed.

Base Budget: This is also referred to as permanent budget. It is usually the annual (sometimes biannual) but ongoing allocation from the university administration for library materials. In state institutions, this is normally the primary “state” fund allocation, often a line-item in the state budget. In private institutions, the base budget may come from permanent endowments to the university that are designated to the library materials budget or other stable revenue resources. The base budget represents an agreed upon figure between the university administration and the library that is the basis for long-range budget planning. The base budget changes incrementally, ideally each year to reflect the cost of library materials and basic changes in programs. Under extreme budgetary constraints, the base budgets are reduced. Unchanging or stagnant base budgets are also possible.

Percentage of Increase to the Base Budget: A common practice among universities is for the library to submit a budget request for library materials to the university administration, reflecting changes in the price of materials and changes in programs. The university administration usually responses by granting a percentage increase to the base budget. This category is closely watched each year by the Discussion Group as it indicates how well other institutions support library collections. Rarely are there decreases in this category and “no increases” are infrequent, so the more positive term, “Percentage of Increase,” as opposed to something like “Percentage of Change” is used in this survey.

One-time money: This refers to money that supplements the base budget and is available normally only for one year. These temporary funds are usually designated for a specific purpose such as to build up an area of the collection or for the purchase of an expensive item. The sources of these funds may be from the university administration, academic departments, and grants.

Endowed and Special Funds: This has been an ambiguous or difficult category for the Chief Collection Development Officers’ Discussion Group, reflecting the differences between funding in public and private institutions. For state institutions, endowments and special funds are often referred to as “non-state” funds, outside of their base budgets and one-time “state” funds. Gift funds may also included in this category by public institutions. For private institutions, endowments may be a primary source for the base budget. What this category generally refers to is endowed and other “non-state” funds which are for specific purposes and are considered supplemental to the base budget and other one-time money.

Areas of Expenditures

This categories refers to what the funds are used to acquire.

Electronic Resources: Electronic resources include any type of electronic/digital resource such as CDRoms, networked resources whether locally mounted or accessed remotely. Expenditures for them have been tracked since 1993/94. There are two responses each year in this category, expenditures for last year and anticipated expenditures or allocations for the current year. In the historical spreadsheets, only the hard expenditures are reflected.

Percentage of Expenditures for Serials/Monographs: The balance between serials and monographs has been one of the earliest categories to be tracked in the survey. The balance is important since it determines how much of the budget is already committed at the beginning of the year. Serials represent fixed costs or continuing commitments that do not stop until some action is taken (i.e, are canceled), and monographs represent discretionary funds or one-time purchases, requiring an item-level decision (i.e., an order must be submitted). While serials and monographs have the connotation of representing printed journals and books respectively, in fact these categories reflect more the manner of acquisition—continuing order and one-time purchase—regardless of format. Thus, the purchase of a video is tracked as a monograph and an electronic resource purchase can be classified under either category depending on how it is purchased. Originally, the serial/monograph percentages were to reflect the balance in the base budget only. However, it is unclear if this is what is still being reported. In some cases, it may represent the total expenditure balance. It was a generally accepted principle to charge serials or continuing costs only against the base or permanent budget. As serial costs have escalated, however, serials purchases have been placed against the so-called supplementary funds such as one-time funds and endowments, an unsound but necessary budgeting practice.

Bibliographic Utilities: Expenditures for this category include RLIN and OCLC fees. This category has been tracked early on in the survey since the use of the materials budget for this type of expenditures, searching of national databases for cataloging records and ready reference, represented a departure from traditional purpose of the materials budget, to acquire content for local ownership. The argument for the use of the materials budget for bibliographic utilities was that these expenditures provided access to information about content, i.e., cataloging records and holdings information in other libraries. All of academic libraries must pay for these services but only some charge their materials budget for them. Among the large research libraries, more than half use other operating funds for purchase of these services. Since these fees can be substantial, those institutions that pay for them with there materials budget significantly reduce their purchasing budget for content. Currently, among the large research library, only about 40% charge these fees to their materials budgets. The averages on the spreadsheets for this category represent only the average amount of the expenditures for those that do charge these fees to the materials budget, not the average of the entire group.

Binding: The binding of periodical and books is fundamental to the maintenance of print collections, but expenditures for binding do not add to the content of the collection. The majority of the large research libraries charge their binding expenditures to the materials budget. Others do not. Since 1997/98, the percentage of the total materials budget used for binding has been tracked. Binding expenditures will be an interesting category to track in the future as publications are increasing in electronic format. Other archiving methods and expenditures will emerge. The averages on the spreadsheets for this category represent only the average amount of the expenditures for those that do charge these fees to the materials budget, not the average of the entire group.

Memberships: Institutional membership fees to certain library organizations are tracked in this category. Until 1993/94, only the cost of membership in the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) was included. Since membership in CRL provides access to important, research materials of low use, CRL membership has long be thought of as a legitimate expenditure from the materials budget. Since 1994/95, membership fees in other major library organizations, the Association for Research Libraries and Research Libraries Group, have been included in this category. Memberships fees to scholarly associations as a means to acquire their publications is not covered in this category. Since these membership fees can be substantial, those institutions that charge them to their materials budget reduce their purchasing power for content. The majority of the large research libraries charge these membership expenditures to the materials budget. Others do not. The averages on the spreadsheets for this category represent only the average amount of the expenditures for those that do charge these fees to the materials budget, not the average of the entire Discussion Group.

ILL/Document Delivery: This category has been tracked since 1995/96. This is another category reflecting expenditures for access to content rather than ownership of content. The two categories represent expenses for “traditional” Interlibrary Loan, that is, the loan of books or copies of journal articles from other libraries, and commercial document delivery services for journal articles through a third party. Increasingly, the latter category is library-subsidized delivery to the users’ desk-tops or faxes to users. Expenditures for document delivery reflects an attempt to make the materials budget more flexible and responsive to enable quick, unmediated access to particular articles in journals to which the library does not subscribe in paper or electronic form. All academic libraries assume the cost of these services. Many of the research libraries charge their materials budgets for these expenditures. Others do not. The averages on the spreadsheets for this category represent only the average amount of the expenditures for those that do charge these fees to the materials budget, not the average of the entire Discussion Group.

Other Expenditures: This category tracked expenditures from the materials budget that was not covered in other categories: serials and monographs, bibliographic utilities, binding, and CRL membership. This category was discontinued on 1994/95 because in succeeding surveys, explicit categories of ILL/Document Delivery, and memberships other than CRL were developed. In addition, there has been a question added concerning the cost of software and hardware as well as electronic cataloging records that is charged to the materials budget. But the use of the materials budget for these expenditures is quite rare so a separate spreadsheet has not been developed to track this. The few instances where this does occur are mentioned in the narrative reports.

Percentage of Expenditures by Broad Subject Categories: An attempt has been made to track the percentage of expenditures in broad subject categories since 1997/98. Precise definitions of the five categories, Art/Humanities, Social Sciences, Science/Technology/Medicine, Areas Studies, and Interdisciplinary are impossible and the categories may overlap. Even so, the data is interesting and tells us much about the kind of collections that are being built. For instance, the New York Public Library with an materials budget of over $10,000,000 spends 41% on its budget on the arts/humanities whereas the average for the Discussion Group in this category is 18%.

Other Categories

The miscellaneous categories below do not fit into the either general headings heading above. They do reflect budget planning.

Approval Plans: Approval plans and blanket orders are means of acquiring domestic and foreign books without ordering each title individually but instead according to an agreement with the vendor to supply books that fall match prearranged guidelines or “profile”. These means of acquisition are widely used in all academic libraries, including the large research libraries. The questions in survey questionnaire in this category specify “anticipated” changes in approval plan allocations during the current year of the survey. It does not reflect expenditures for the previous year. Initially, only reduction in the approval plan were asked for, since reduced expenditures in this area seemed reflective of budgetary uncertainty and a need to pull back in “prearrange” acquisitions of books. The early data for this category are sketchy at best, but somewhat useful. In recent years, the survey also requested changes, both reductions and increases, in this category, as well as the actual expenditures in this category since 1997/98.

Serials Cancellations: Serials cancellations reflect budget planning, based on anticipated price increases for serials and the materials budget allocation. The questions in the survey asked for completed data from the previous year, how many titles canceled and how much was saved and also if the institutions plans to cancel title in the current years. As the cost of serials has risen and budgets have not kept up with inflation, cancellation has been a common means of budgetary control.

Shelf-ready Vendor Plan: A shelf-ready vendor plan may properly be understood as any blanket order, for which a vendor provides a library with materials that arrive pre-funded, bound, cataloged, with all necessary shelf markings and other processing features needed for the item to proceed immediately to the shelf. Libraries may opt for partial versions of this model, with materials arriving from the vendor with some but not all of these elements in place—pre-funded plans, pre-bound plans, etc. The purpose of these models is generally to outsource labor-intensive processing and to move materials more quickly to the shelves, where library users can find them.