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16 February 1998
RWA Notes
1. Series Report. David Block asked to be notified by selectors who would be interested in receiving copies of the monographic series report which shows series on review with no SIDs. These items are funded to specific lines. Further questions about these reports should be directed to David.
2. ERC. Sam reported on the initial meetings of the Electronic Resources Committee. The purpose of this group is to field any requests for new networked resources that require special procedures or action. Only new resources that present special difficulties in acquisition, cataloging or access provision need to be submitted to ERC. The Committee is now working on a set of guidelines for selectors, that will let them know the types of selections that should be submitted. If there is some doubt, the selector may submit the item to Scott Wicks, who will decide whether it should be sent to the Committee or can be processed directly. In the long term, Sam said, ERC intends to put itself out of business by mainstreaming all processes, so that there are eventually no longer any exceptions. The form for submitting an item to the ERC will be found on the Web at http://www.library.cornell.edu/DLWG/CERREPOR.htm#Form.
3. Budget 1998/99. We have received a materials budget from Day Hall that is very unusual, and that will cause us some difficulty. Because endowment pay-outs have increased at a rate that is far beyond what we expected, we will receive in our endowments ca. $300,000 more than the University anticipated. Day Hall has therefore subtracted that "windfall," which we will receive in our endowment lines, from our appropriated materials budget--so that the total increase of appropriated funds will be only 0.5%. We will need, therefore, to reduce those appropriated lines which support subject areas that are also supported by endowments. Because some lines are too restricted, or because some areas (i.e., Rare and History of Science) have no appropriated funding to reduce, this method of redistribution will only work for ca. $150,000. We can, in other words, create a central pot of $150,000 in appropriated funding to allocate by reducing the appropriated lines of those subjects that have endowments. And we should be able to add ca. $75,000 from elsewhere--which would bring the total amount available for allocation next year to ca. $225,000, i.e., a budget increase of 3.4%. It is clear, however, that the amount of bookkeeping work that will need to be done to manage this redistribution will be substantial, and will have a significant cost for the Library.
There were a number of suggestions, most of them serious, about how we might respond to this unprecedented situation. David Block said this is a new way of budgeting, that we will need to get used to--with our allocation including our endowment increases. I noted that we now have no choice but to begin paying for more of our subscriptions on endowments. Several people pointed out that this will have a serious effect on our ability to track our budget over time: either we do not count the endowments this year (i.e., we announce a 0.5% increase), or we go back and recalculate all previous years to include the endowments. In any event, we need to study over the next month how we can implement this--and we need to look for creative accounting methods to keep down the cost of the bookkeeping changes.
We are assuming that the University has taken these same steps for all of the colleges--although it is likely that more of our endowments may be restricted than those of the colleges. The Library will communicate to Day Hall the effect of this funding decision on the collections.
In addition to this special problem with the materials budget this year, we will also be facing several other pressures, that are likely to make this year a major budgeting challenge. First, we will need to increase somewhat the amount we spend on the Yankee approval plan--both for the humanities/social sciences and for the sciences, because both plans are underfunded this year. Second, we have very large increases in the NTIS subscription. Third, the move of Elsevier into the social sciences will have a major effect on social science database budgeting. (The price next year of Lexis/Nexis and the CIS databases will increase dramatically, even when purchased through consortia.) And fourth, our main aggregator this year (OCLC--First Search) has told us that the cost of having the same access next year will be substantially greater, so we must assume that we will be spending rather more next year simply to maintain access to the databases we presently have.
4. Budget Review. We briefly examined the current state of the materials budget for this year, including the general funds. The endowed units (less Law) were 69% spent at 58% through the year, which seems normal. The only major pressure on the general funds is the approval plan. The database line is still holding up well, although we do have some costs outstanding, and we have not subscribed to some items that we had budgeted for. Our practice of maintaining some large central endowments for one-time supplemental funding will probably not be sustainable in the new budgeting environment--so I expect I will allocate those large endowments to subject lines, in return for appropriated funding. -- We also compared our budget to that of the other large research libraries, as reported in the annual Big Heads budget survey. While our budget has remained steady, those libraries with which we compare ourselves, such as Columbia, Michigan and Stanford, have consistently received somewhat larger increases. In comparison to most large institutions, however, Cornell has a very reasonable and stable budget.
5. DRTF. I talked briefly about the Database Review Task Force. It will include Sam Demas, John Saylor, Janie Harris, Ali Houissa, Yoram Szekely, Patricia O'Neill, Michael Engle, and at least one other person from public services. The purpose of this group will be twofold. First, it will review the databases to which we presently subscribe, and will decide, with input from collection development and public services, what we should maintain and what we should change. Given the pressures on the budget next year, the importance of this work will be even greater than we had initially anticipated. Second, the group will examine the full text resources that we might want to add. It is unclear at this point about the extent to which we will be able to accomplish this second goal, although I have hopes that we can undertake at least some expansion of our full-text networked resources.
6. CPCRs. One of the goals of the tactical plan for the next two years is to "build the collections required of a major university according to a rational collection development policy." A rational policy will certainly entail a clear and systematic division of selection responsibilities throughout the system, so the work we have begun on the Cornell Primary Collection Responsibilities will play directly into this. Once we have assembled all of the pieces, we will have a much more accurate overview of who is responsible for what. David Block presented a number of examples as to how we might arrange the presentation of such material, so that it is consistent and easily accessible. Don and others expressed the hope that the new LMS will allow us to gather statistics on expenditures and use, which will show how funds are actually being spent--and how the materials purchased are actually being used. That kind of empirical information will provide us with an even more useful insight into the parameters of our current collection effort. The primary requirement of collection development for the new LMS is precisely such a more effective data gathering capacity.
7. Offsite Selection. The new Annex is nearly complete, and the move will begin on 6 April. Because the move will encounter many unexpected problems and obstacles in the course of the next two years, it is essential that the moving operation have maximum flexibility. At the same time, the move is of great importance to many staff and faculty. The decision has been made, therefore, to undertake the move in segments. While the long-term order of those segments cannot be firm, there will be firm, short-term information as to when a particular segment (a unit's collection, or a part of the collection of a larger unit) will be moved. The information that a particular part of the collection is targeted for moving in the next, say, two months will be posted on the Web. Faculty or staff interested in making any last minute adjustments will thus know how much time they have to do this. For those libraries that will be using a computer generated pick-list, the important date is not when the move will start, but rather when the final list will be run. Catherine has produced a set of Frequently Asked Questions that will be posted on the Web, and will probably also be sent to department chairs. I distributed copies of this; any questions should be directed to Catherine, Pat Schafer or me.
Pat said that the move will begin with a shift of the archival boxes already in the old Annex, but the move of books from campus libraries will begin shortly thereafter. The fork lift is scheduled for delivery in mid-April. The inventory control system has been selected; it will be purchased and installed before the move begins. Although all of the operational staffing has not yet been identified, there is every intention of providing full retrieval service from the Annex immediately, in order to honor our commitments to the users. Currently we are assuming that there will be two deliveries from the Annex per day.
8. LMS Reality Check. There were no concerns or questions about the process of the LMS demonstrations. Sam noted that he hoped any LMS would have the capacity to allow the selector to fill out some kind of form for a selected networked resource, that could then be sent electronically to acquisitions--thus saving acquisitions the time of rekeying the information, and allowing the selector the opportunity to include notes on any issues pertinent to the purchase. This led to a short discussion about whether selectors will need in future to invest more time in filling out forms; while this is not unlikely, such forms will be increasingly online.
9. Small Endowments. Every year, we receive a number of small endowments--usually for $5,000, which generate ca. $250 per year in revenue. I decide on who gets these endowments--usually based on information I have received about funding pressures. I try to give such small endowments to lines with fewer funds, where a smaller amount of money will make a noticeable difference. I also try to spread these endowments out among various funds, so that I am not giving them to the same subjects over time. We talked about alternatives to this method--including the possibly of my holding these small endowments centrally, and using them, e.g., for approval materials. We finally concluded that it is much preferable from a fund raising standpoint to continue to distribute these funds to subject areas--so that we can report to donors the subjects upon which we are spending their donations. There was general agreement, therefore, that I will continue to assign these small endowments, as I have done in the past. Large endowments, on the other hand, will be assigned only with the input of CDExec.
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