Collection Allocation Update

Library Collection Allocation Update
March 2005

Background

The Library Collection Budget Allocation Task Group (reporting to the Senate Library Committee) was formed in 1999 to address issues of equity between departmental budget allocations.  At its June 26, 2000 meeting the Senate Library Committee recommended the acceptance of the Report of the Collection Allocation Task Group.

This update provides a review of the Library's progress in implementing the recommendations of the 2000 Report.

Changes in the environment since 2000

There have been two noteworthy changes in the overall environment for library acquisitions in the intervening five years.
1) Strong support for the collections budget from the university administration, combined with the rise in the Canadian dollar and collaborative purchasing have increased the Library's purchasing power. The widespread perception on campus that "no department's allocation is large enough" is no longer pervasive, as it was in the years leading up to the Report;

2) The advent of bundled packages of electronic journals and the Library's aggresive migration to online-only journals has caused significant shifts in the distribution of serials allocations (discussion under recommendation 6d).

Progress on recommendations

The Report included a Summary of Recommendations. Each recommendation is listed below with a report on progress.

1) The Library collection allocation process be made as open and equitable as possible.
The Library makes its collection budget widely available to the university community each year. Current and historical budget information, including detailed annual allocations and expenditure reports, are available on the Library’s web site. The budget is also distributed electronically and in print to the Senate Library Committee and to departmental library representatives each year, and there is opportunity for discussion at meetings of each group. In keeping with this recommendation, the Library reports to the Senate Library Committee each year on reallocations and special expenditures, such as purchases from the endowment funds.

When significant changes to the overall pattern of allocation have been planned, the Library has scheduled meetings of departmental library representatives to discuss them. In recent years, the Faculty of Arts and Faculty of Science Library Users Committees (FALUC, SCILUC) have also each met to discuss shifts in collection allocations resulting from the Library’s participation in licenses for large bundled packages of multidisciplinary journals. The Head of Collections has also attended department meetings in several departments to provide information about collection allocations and to answer questions.

2) It is recommended that Education and Communications collection budgets be increased.
Designated funding was identified to provide increases in the Education and Communications allocations following the release of the June 2000 Report. These adjustments correct the historical inequity in allocations for these areas.

Education's allocation between 2000/01 and 2002/03 rose from $114,100 to $148,700, or 30% over two years. Education primarily used the designated funds to add new journal subscriptions and identified funding specifically for the purchase of textbooks used in elementary and secondary schools.

Communications' allocation between 2001/02 and 2003/04 rose from $46,900 to $57,450, or 23% over two years. Communications primarily used the designated funds to add new journal subscriptions.

3) It is recommended that data for groupings of departmental funds, (based on monograph purchases, budget size, and known affinities), be produced for several years. An assessment should then be made of the advantages/disadvantages of combining these on an ongoing basis.
Data has been collected since 2000 that would allow production of grouped reports. However, the Library has chosen not to proceed further with this recommendation. The Report cites the need to "provide more flexibility" and to "bring like purchases together" as the rationale for creating these large subject groupings in the collections budget. The possible long term outcome of this recommendation was the ongoing grouping of these funds (i.e. dismantling of department-based allocations). After consideration of this proposal, the Library has concluded that dismantling department-based allocations in favour of these larger groupings should not be pursued. The current arrangement aligns well with our successful department-based liaison librarian model, and allows for good accountability to departments. Collections Management and liaison librarians maintain an active consultation process to ensure the collection needs of multidisciplinary programs (e.g. Cognitive Science) are met by current collecting.

4)It is recommended that:
a. Part of the process for the establishment of a new department should include an examination of the collection resources required, and the source of funding for those resources
Where new departments have been established since 2000, the Library has been adequately involved in the process to secure funding for required collections. The Library’s continued active involvement in the university’s curriculum approval process via membership on Senate Committee on Undergraduate Studies (SCUS), Senate Graduate Studies Committee (SGSC), Senate, and other academic planning committees has been crucial to this success. Procedures within the Library for new course assessments have also recently been revised to streamline this process.

The establishment of the Faculty of Health Sciences has had a significant impact on the Library. The Institute for Health Research and Education (IHRE) and now the Faculty of Health Sciences have been very supportive of the Library's requirement to build new collections. Funding has been secured for retrospective collection building and recently approved Health programs, and the Library continues to pursue ongoing funding for new programs in this Faculty as they are developed.

The School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey has likewise presented a need for collection building in that area. The Library's active involvement in various Surrey planning groups has allowed us to make a successful case for collections funding there.

During the period since the Report, the related issue of existing programs moving from the Burnaby campus to Surrey or Downtown has emerged as equally challenging. Because such courses and programs are not required to go through the university's curriculum approval process, the Library does not necessarily have an effective mechanism for ensuring that adequate collections are available on-site where the programs will be delivered. In one important upcoming example, the Library will work closely with the School for Contemporary Arts regarding their pending move downtown. The larger issue remains a challenge.

b. The Library should be proactive in identifying new faculty and new research interests and seeking ways to support them.
Contact with new faculty members is primarily made by liaison librarians. Invitations for collection suggestions are made directly to new facutly members by liaison librarians at the time of introduction, along with information about library services. Several departments that anticipated significant faculty recruitment have held serial funds aside to address journal needs of new faculty members. The Library also meets with incoming faculty members as part of their campus orientation, and invites requests for new acquisitions. In the Schools of Engineering and Computing Science, the "Double The Opportunity" funding received by the Library has been used, in part, to fund collection requests from new faculty hires.

c. A contingency fund be should set aside each year for purchase of expenditures for monographs for new faculty and new departments and purchase of new electronic resources or other materials.
A contingency fund for this purpose has been built into the collection budget since the 2000/01 budget year. The amount has varied but has never been less than the $50,000 suggested in the Report.

5) Departments established subsequent to 1992/93 (Earth Sciences, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Humanities, Statistics) should be addressed on a priority basis by the Library in consultation with the department and other related units; the goal should be to provide adequate library resources within the constraints of the Library budget and other departmental requirements.

Allocations for each of these new departments have grown considerably since 2000, as follows:

Humanities established in 2000/01 with a budget of $3,000, the allocation has risen to $10,500 in 2004/05

MBB established in 2001/02 with a partial serials allocation of $156,700, the allocation rose to $346,200 by 2002/03 when the remainder of the MBB serials list and a monograph allocation were added.

Earth Sciences allocation grew from $54,600 in 1999/00 to $98,000 in 2002/03, an increase of 79% over 3 years.

Statistics established in 2001/02 with a budget of $64,800, the allocation rose to $73,200 in 2002/03. The Library is currently working with the department to fund a list of new journals; this should be possible in 2005/06, and the departmental library representative has expressed satisfaction with our approach.

Note: 2003/04 and following are difficult to compare directly to previous years for Science departments, due to the move of large portions of serial funds into general library accounts for bundled packages of journals.

6) a. The collection budget should fund materials purchased for the collection in any format, or acquired for use of a single individual through Interlibrary Loan, or licensed for use.
In 2000/01 the Library's payments for interlibrary loan borrowing were moved into the collections budget to address this recommendation, and have remained there since.

b. Purchased or licensed materials will be assigned to collection funds regardless of format or purpose.
This is the case. All expenditures are assigned to collection funds, with one exception. Since the transfer of the university's media collection to the Library in 2003, an allocation has been established for acquiring films, videos and DVDs. These are not currently purchased out of departmental allocations, but out of a general fund based on format. With less than two years of data about purchasing patterns, it would be challenging to divide this small allocation up among departments. It may be reasonable to do so in the future with the growth of activity in this area, by which time we will have enough data to make an equitable division.

c. The Library should encourage ‘principled publishing’ by supporting publishers and organizations such as SPARC, High Wire Press, etc. where they support the Library’s collection policies.
The Library has actively supported principled publishing over the past five years in several ways:

• membership in BioMedCentral, an Open Access publisher
• membership in three of the SPARC Scientific Communities Program: MIT CogNet, Project Euclid, and BioOne
• subscriptions to 11 of the 13 SPARC alternative journals
• sustaining contribution to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy via the SEP International Association
• links to hundreds of Open Access journals via the library catalogue and e-journals database, where appropriate
• continued support of university presses, including both book and journal publishing, as well as new electronic ventures from larger presses
• hosted speakers from BioMedCentral and SEP for the Library and campus community

The Library is committed to supporting such principled publishing endeavors where they align with our collection development interests.

d. Materials of wide general interest should be moved to the general library account.
Following the Report, a review of general interest publications purchased from departmental accounts was undertaken. The department primarily affected was Political Science; 112 general publications, including general interest materials such as parliamentary papers and legislative publications, were moved from Political Science accounts into general library accounts.

Another important change in allocation patterns has occurred since 2000, and is related to this recommendation. It results from the advent of large bundled packages of electronic journals available directly from publishers, in place of the former title-by-title subscriptions held by libraries in print. The SFU Library has evaluated these opportunities as they have arisen, and elected to sign on to several: Springer/Kluwer, Elsevier Science Direct (including Academic Press imprints), John Wiley, Cambridge University Press, PsycArticles (American Psychological Assoc.), American Chemical Society, Royal Society of Chemistry and the Institute of Physics. Because these resources are licensed collectively via library consortia and are often multidisciplinary in nature, they are funded out of general accounts in the collections budget. In order to free up funds to pay for these packages, the Library has moved aggressively towards online-only access, canceling the majority of the print subscriptions involved. As a result of this process, access to electronic journals has grown from less than 1,000 to over 10,000 titles during this period. Over $2 million has been moved from departmental allocations to general library accounts to achieve this. Rationale and financial details have been provided to the community during the process. Involving over 25% of the budget, this shift will have a very significant effect on any future analysis of collection allocations, and will complicate direct comparisons with figures from the 2000 Report. Nevertheless, we are confident that the active liaison programme, and the open consultative process we have established will ensure that collection allocation imbalances are addressed in a timely and satisfactory way.

e. There should continue to be flexibility in the budget allocation by allowing the transfer of funds from discretionary allocations to purchase serials, if the serials budget is less than 90% for that group.
The Library has upheld this policy and many departments have used it to shift funds to serial lines the budget. In many cases, this was simply to fund new journals desired by the department. In other cases, it recognized the shift in publishing modes, for example in Psychology and Computing Science, where important collections of books are now being published electronically and licensed for an annual fee; funds have been moved from the book budgets to cover part of the cost of these resources.

The lifts to the Library’s acquisitions budget since 2000 have made it possible to allow such shifts comfortably without eroding the book budget. Despite the shifts of funds to serial lines in several departments, monograph purchasing has grown during this period.

Conclusion

The Library has made good progress on all recommendations, with the exception of number 3 which we have chosen not to pursue. Feedback to the Library through the Senate Library Committee, FALUC, SCILUC, and departmental library representatives indicates that collection allocations are now meeting real and perceived campus needs.

The Library feels it is not necessary to undertake another detailed allocation review at this time. We will continue to report back to Senate Library Committee on collection allocations; a subsequent detailed review will be planned if the need arises.