2014 Charleston Library Conference

As Collins (2001) found in his evaluation of how companies make the transition from good to great, one of the key components to this transition was to focus less on continuing tasks, and more on NOT continuing tasks. Today’s librarians are juggling instruction, reference, collection development, outreach, and the need to develop new expertise in emerging areas, such as data curation. At the same time, materials budgets are overwhelmingly becoming devoted to subscription resources and digital collections. Librarians can’t responsibly continue all of our traditional tasks with these shifting budget priorities and new responsibilities. Librarians need to rethink traditional methods of monograph acquisition by individual subject librarians in order to find sustainable and flexible approaches to selection, reduce duplication of efforts, align collecting practices with budget priorities, and better meet cross-disciplinary campus needs.

This session will document the experience of a cluster of allied health librarians collapsing 5 siloed fund lines to collaboratively collect monographs from a single budget line. Attendees will learn about the impact of the workload change on acquisitions staff, collection management, and allied health librarians over the course of the fiscal year. Results will include our preliminary analysis of the 2012-2013 individual purchasing year as compared with the 2013-2014 collapsed pilot-year. Comparisons will include examining the distribution of purchases across LC subject classes and funds as contrasted with campus enrollment, institutional priorities, and new programs. Discussion regarding opportunities and challenges related to this method, current and future assessment points, and next steps will engage the audience in contemplating how we as a profession we will define success with this interdisciplinary acquisitions model.