More bang for the buck: increasing the effectiveness of library expenditures through cooperation.

ABSTRACT

The long-term strategy of the academic library community needs to focus on improved cost effectiveness rather than becoming preoccupied with the short-term effects of budget reductions. Fortunately, the rise of consortia and the maturing of the automation environment provide a conducive environment for substantial gains in the cost-benefit ratio over a wide range of library services. Examples of such gains in four key library service areas are described.

INTRODUCTION

At a time when the restraints on academic library budgets are universally painful and seemingly ongoing, it is easy to believe that the fundamental problem for academic libraries is retrenchment and cost cutting--easy, but wrong and short-sighted. The underlying focus for budgetary attention, whether times are flush or flushed, should be a concern to get the most value out of each dollar spent. In the last decade and a half the convergence of two explosive trends--the rise of digital information and consortial organization--have provided radical new possibilities for improving libraries' abilities to get more value out of each dollar spent. Such a positive approach to the budget can also provide a strong implicit argument for preserving or even increasing the library's share of limited university resources. But whatever the library budget ultimately, the rightful concern for present-day librarians is the potential these two new developments have to increase the value received for library motley spent. OhioLINK, a consortium of Ohio academic libraries, as well as other consortial examples, provide illuminating instances, if not a comprehensive survey, of how such an approach to increasing cost effectiveness can work.

Four rather different areas of library service agendas can illustrate how creative use of these two new developments can improve the cost-benefit ratio of library expenditures: sharing printed books, storing print materials, providing access to the journal literature electronically, and providing access to electronic versions of library special collections, faculty publications, or university projects through a consortial institutional repository. In each of these areas, OhioLINK libraries have dramatically expanded access while at the same time improved the cost-benefit ratio of library services through use of a consortial approach combined with appropriate digital technology. It is important to note that the end game for each of these projects is not to return money to the university administration but to improve and expand services to the user community.

SHARING BOOKS IN A COST-EFFECTIVE MANNER

Books in printed form continue to represent a vast and valuable resource for most academic libraries. Although the idea of using digital technology to share books by putting printed books online goes back more than a decade, and recent announcements by Google and its library partners suggest the first realistic expectation that such an approach might actually come to pass, (1) replacing print books with digital materials on a widespread basis still remains a future possibility. In the meantime, the printed collections held by academic libraries may be in many cases the most monetarily valuable single item owned by a university. Some years ago, for example, when it became necessary to establish a monetary value for the library collection at the University of Cincinnati (UC) for insurance purposes (an intellectually foolish but fiscally required exercise), the resulting value was $117,674,821. (2) Built up over time, academic library print collections universally represent a huge university or college investment.

Ironically, the larger and intellectually richer the collection and its attendant larger acquisition costs, the lower the cost-benefit ratio to the institution, since per title use of large collections is quite small. An informal study at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign prior to installing compact shelving in the main stacks, for example, showed that only around 1 percent of the main stack collection was circulated in any given year, while an earlier landmark study of collection use at Pittsburgh suggested that many research books were acquired "just in case" and languished on the shelves, with almost 40 percent of new acquisitions not circulating in seven years (Calvin & Kent, 1977). (3) Even in small, ostensibly high-use collections, the books linger on the shelves. A 1977 study of book circulation at Columbia-Green Community College showed that only 35 percent of the books circulated in a fifteen-month period (Ettelt, 1978). Attempts to leverage the large investment in these collections and expand access to local patrons through interinstitutional borrowing privileges for faculty and graduate students or through interlibrary loan (ILL) were useful steps but represented a negligible increase in use compared to local borrowing. In the case of ILL, such a strategy of sharing represented an expensive solution, at a combined $31.00 per transaction for the borrowing and lending institution (Jackson, 1998).

The rise of consortia in the early 1990s and the relative maturity of library bibliographic automation, which allowed real-time knowledge of not just library holdings but library circulation records as well, opened up new possibilities for taking advantage of the past huge investment in printed books as well as increasing the efficiency of developing collections. There are three basic principles: (1) it is much cheaper to make low-use and marginal books available to local patrons by borrowing from other institutions rather than by purchasing them; (2) substantial sharing among consortial members requires major reductions in the unit cost of borrowing and major increases in the ease and speed of sharing materials; and (3) it is possible to substantially improve the cost per use of a book title as well as increase the richness of the collection by transferring money spent on unnecessary duplication to purchase of new titles.

There are several examples of how this can work in practice. In the case of OhioLINK, we have managed to increase the effective collection size of each participating institution to 43,500,000 items, including 9,259,000 unique titles. We have dramatically reduced the traditional ILL costs between member libraries by using patron-initiated requests and a staffing context that requires little more than low-cost student labor. Based on an in-house study at the University of Cincinnati, the round-trip delivery costs using student labor came to less than $1.00 per requested and returned item. We have forty-eight-hour turnaround for 75 percent of interinstitutional borrowing requests and seventy-two-hour turnaround for 95 percent of our interinstitutional borrowing requests. A variety of cooperative tools and approaches have been developed, and libraries are experimenting with…