SFU Library materials budget 2019/2020

General information

Here is the 2019/20 library materials budget.

This budget reflects support from the University to protect the budget from exposure to the US exchange rate.  Approximately 85% of expenditures are in USD--without this support subscription cancellations and/or reductions to book lines of close to $2M would be needed to balance the budget.

This budget has been set with the assumption of the US/Canadian exchange rate at 1.31.  In order to provide predictability in this regard, USD has been forward purchased at this agreed upon rate for our forecasted need.

Please note the following additional points about this budget:

  1. Starting this fiscal year, funds totaling $103,000 have been added to the materials budget to support the new Sustainable Energy Engineering Program.
  2. Serial allocations have been set based on increases of 3% over the previous year’s expenditures, and with support for the USD/CAD exchange rate of 1.31, corrected for format changes, new subscriptions, cancellations, and other factors.
  3. Monograph allocations have been supported to account for some or all of the USD/CAD exchange rate.  Some funds may also have corrections to account for new serials, or cancelled/ceased serials.

General Electronic Serials Packages fund

This fund pays for:

  • the journal packages (Big Deals) from the five largest multi-disciplinary journal publishers: Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Frances, Springer, SAGE.
  • a few smaller publisher journal packages: Oxford, Cambridge, Emerald, Annual Reviews.
  • some aggregator journal packages: JSTOR, Project Muse.

Funds for books, serials, and databases (budget lines)

An explanation of the various types of funds used in the budget appears below. Note that not all funds have all the following codes.

Books

Includes:

  • Approvals: purchases received in book form based on subject profiles set up with our major book vendor.  Primary subjects are covered by these approvals profiles.  Approximately 20% of all book titles purchased on Dept./Faculty funds come in on Approval.
  • Forms: purchases from notifications received based on subject profiles set up with our major book vendor.  Secondary subjects are covered by forms in the profiles.  Approximately 40% of all book titles purchased on Dept./Faculty funds are a result of this alerting program.
  • Discretionary: purchases from information provided by faculty and students, or selected directly by the liaison librarian without input from our major book vendor.  Included in this category are ebook packages, the purchase of which is not supported by our current book vendor.  This method accounts for 40% of purchases on Dept./Faculty book funds.

Serials & databases

Includes:

  • Periodicals: cover the journals purchased by the Library, both print and electronic.
  • Serials: cover other regularly purchased items that are bought from year to year.  These consist of yearbooks, annuals, handbooks, monographic series on standing order, etc.
  • Databases: cover electronic indexes, and other databases that are paid for each year (eg. leased ebook collections, market reports, financial data, encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc.).  Subject based databases are covered in the departmental budgets and more general databases are purchased out of general funds.