Re: Cease claiming, checking in, binding Rick Anderson 19 Jan 2010 17:03 UTC
> Your direct labor costs can be readily measured. Your opportunity cost is > obscure. One of the standard mistakes we make in libraries, IMHO, is that we measure what's easy to measure and ignore what's hard to measure, even when what's hard to measure is more important. I would suggest that direct labor costs -- though easily measurable -- are much less important than opportunity cost, which may not be measurable in exact units but can be enormous. I don't have to be able to measure opportunity cost in units to know that one staff-hour spent on print management is a staff-hour not spent on online-resource management. At my institution, usage of printed materials has been falling rapidly for more than a decade, while usage of online materials has been skyrocketing over the same period. If (as I do) I consider control to be a means to the end of patron service rather than an end in itself, then I should probably consider sacrificing some control of low-use print in favor of greater control of high-use online. But that's me and my institution. Your mileage may vary. > Your aggregate investment in man-hours will decline as your portfolio of > subscriptions declines. There are not any sunk costs associated with the mere > adoption of the procedure. You're right. The cost associated with the adoption of any procedure is almost entirely opportunity cost. See above. > Not remarking issues as they arrive and failing to make periodic complaints to > your agency over issues not delivered is an indication that you have, in a > rough-and-ready way, elected to write-off part of the inventory for which you > have paid. That's technically correct, but misleadingly phrased. To put it more accurately: I cease traditional check-in and claiming practices if I determine that those practices have an insufficient impact on patron service to justify them, especially when higher-impact activities are waiting in the wings. Traditional claiming has a real-world impact on far fewer issues than are actually claimed (it has no impact on those that would come whether claimed or not, and none on those that will never come regardless of claims). Check-in creates records that have little or no real-world impact on patron access (the fact, for example, that an issue has arrived doesn't help a patron if the issue isn't on the shelf). The creation of meaningless and low-impact records would impose no meaningful opportunity cost if higher-impact tasks were not available for staff to do. But, in my library's case anyway, they are. That's the argument for doing away with check-in -- not that check-in isn't valuable, but that it isn't valuable enough. -- Rick Anderson Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections Marriott Library Univ. of Utah rick.anderson@utah.edu (801) 721-1687