RE: Building collections in a bad economy

[T Scott Plutchak <tscott@uab.edu>]

I think Joe is on the right track here and we are trying to move 
in this direction.

By way of background, with the budget that I'm currently in the 
process of preparing for next year, we will have reduced our 
spending on content by roughly 50% over the course of four years. 
This necessitates that we do some radical rethinking of how we 
spend those funds.  Buying a lot of stuff just in case somebody 
needs it sometime really isn't a viable option anymore.

Consequently, we are focusing our core collection on materials 
that we need to support clinical care, to address accreditation 
requirements, and that are specifically requested by faculty who 
can make a good case that they will be highly used.

Starting probably in January 2010, we will set aside a sum 
(probably around $150K to $200K) to subsidize interlibrary loan 
and pay-per-view.  We're still working out the details, but the 
general idea is that we would provide a base subsidy that would 
be the same regardless of whether we're obtaining something from 
another library or direct from the publisher.  So if you (the 
faculty member or student) want to pay just a few dollars, we'll 
have it for you within a day or two (we fill about 90% of our 
ILLs in 24hrs), or, if you're willing to pay the difference 
between our subsidy and the publisher's pay-per-view cost, we'll 
get it for you right away.

This is an experiment and we will undoubtedly screw some things 
up, so we'll adjust.  But in principle, this means that we'd be 
spending our scarce dollars on things that people really do need, 
rather than on stuff that somebody might need.

For this to work, we need to have a very high level of personal 
engagement with the faculty and students.  We've been laying the 
groundwork for this over the past several years through our 
liaison programs, and will be working hard to strengthen those 
communication efforts over the next six months.  It requires 
faculty to think differently about what they need and when they 
need it and how they interact with the librarians to get it, and 
it requires us to be much more attuned to shifting research 
priorities.

One interesting side note.  In some of our discussions with 
publishers we've been pointing out that in this scenario, part of 
the competition that the publisher faces is from other libraries, 
so it would be in their interest to bring their pay-per-view 
charges down to something closer to typical ILL charges so that 
more of those individual requests will go directly to the 
publisher rather than out through the ILL networks.  It'll be 
interesting to see how that evolves.

T. Scott Plutchak

Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
tscott@uab.edu