Iowa State University: Managing Acquisition And Cataloging Cost

Iowa State University: Managing Acquisition and Cataloging Costs Across the United States academic institutions have watched their budgets dwindle over the past last couple decades. These declining resources led many academic libraries to look at two of the more expensive functions of libraries, the costs of cataloging and acquisitions. One of these academic libraries, Iowa State University (ISU), specifically ISU’s William Robert Parks and Ellen Sorge Parks Library’s Technical Services Division (TSD) began a longitudinal study in 1986 to address these concerns. This study ran into and reflects common situations that were occurring in nearly every academic library across the United States, which most noticeably the move from card to electronic

By switching to a lone major vendor, ISU was able to increase the purchasing and ordering speeds and also cut down in errors that may occur when working with multiple vendors. By 1996, Parks Library worked together with OCLC and YBP Library Services to implement PromptCat records. Both of these events were minor to what happened leading up to the year 2000 and the feared “Y2K” computer bug. As each passing year but the computer problem closer the monograph and acquisitions staff decided to transition to the ILS system, Horizon. Although this plan was a proactive plan to defend the library’s system against the “Y2K’ bug, but instead the library had to take a three-month break from December 1998 to February 1999 while the staff trained, migrated information, and adjusted to the change. All of these different changes had their advantages and disadvantages, the new modifications helped improve the overall workflow of the monograph acquisitions, but it also had it’s drawback since much of the the department does relies on other departments within the walls of Parks Library. As mentioned before the Monographs Acquisitions and Serials Acquisitions were combined during this study, although these two entities worked together for a portion of this study they both had different experiences when it came to addressing budget and resource

To measure this, the department looked to study and measure the amount of staff’s time was used to accomplish the organizations objectives, and the amount of money the department had to use. Due to advancements in technology and automation of many of the serial acquisitions tasks the staff assumed that like the other two departments, automation would allow the department to cut staff while continuing to provide quality service. When they made the switch to a more automated system the library did see that staff were able to process their serial acquisitions more efficiently since publishers, especially electronic publishers provide much of the meta data now. This spare time that the staff now had thanks to automation was quickly taken over, however, by other tasks in an effort to help provide resources to their users and boost the library overall. In the end, automation did not help the serial acquisition department like it did for the other departments, especially after these new tasks the department was taking on was causing them to actually spend more money than they spending prior to switching to an automated system. Although the serials acquisitions department attempted to