Synopsis
Have the high costs of information and reductions in library budgets put you in a dilemma? Declining Acquisitions Budgets is a key resource in beginning the task of re-thinking traditional methods of collection development and maintenance.
The contributing authors to this volume provide you with thought-provoking chapters which touch on library, business, and societal issues as related to your work as a library administrator. They enable you to take a more economical approach to developing and maintaining a great collection--with a smaller budget.
Specific areas covered by the contributors include:
- ideas for the director facing an acquisitions dilemma
- a unique formula for maintaining book collections
- new strategies for reevaluating acquisitions budgeting
- allocating acquisitions budgets with flexibility
- new practices in acquisitions budgeting based on the Ohio State University libraries’indexing system
- access vs. ownership in science collection development
- a project outline to gather circulation information for use in collection development
- what services a subscription vendor can offer in the collection assessment and evaluation process
Library professionals throughout the country need to learn how to survive in a world of rising information costs and reductions in library budgets. Declining Acquisitions Budgets is a step in the right direction, with insightful strategies and ideas to help readers negotiate their way through these troublesome times.
Library Journal
This collection of papers, also published as the Journal of Library Administration, Vol. 19, No. 2, grapples with one of the most perplexing problems facing libraries today: the gap between the library's needs and its financial resources. Higher than normal inflation in publishing prices, fueled by the pressure to publish, with the consequent proliferation of articles and books, and exacerbated by declining library budgets equates to fewer resources for acquisitions. The familiar options (cooperation collection development, denunciation of publishers' prices, pleas for more money, access rather than ownership, formula budgeting, and electronic publishing) are explored and discarded. Only Charles Hamaker offers hope in suggesting ``fundamental rethinking of how the scientific literature is produced and purchased and used.'' A thorough scholarly discussion of interest only to academic librarians, this book is of little practical value. Not a nec-essary purchase.-Nancy Myers, Univ. of South Dakota Lib., Vermillion