This article was downloaded by: [University of Waterloo]On: 09 October 2014, At: 17:24Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

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Library Materials BudgetAllocation Strategy for a Mid-Size Academic LibrarySulekha Kalyan aa University Library, Seton Hall University , 400South Orange Avenue, South Orange, NJ, 07079, USAPublished online: 20 Jan 2009.

To cite this article: Sulekha Kalyan (2003) Library Materials Budget AllocationStrategy for a Mid-Size Academic Library, The Acquisitions Librarian, 15:29, 119-131

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J101v15n29_10

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Library Materials BudgetAllocation Strategy

for a Mid-Size Academic Library:A Case Study

Sulekha Kalyan

SUMMARY. Historically libraries have been allocating their budget usinga formula based on usage statistics and cost of the materials. Today, alloca-tions need to be adjusted from year to year, because of the constantly chang-ing educational priorities of the institutions and the budgetary constrains

SPECIAL REPORTS

Sulekha Kalyan is Acquisitions Librarian/Assistant Professor, University Library,Seton Hall University, 400 South Orange Avenue, South Orange, NJ 07079 (E-mail:Kalyansu@shu.edu).

The author would like to acknowledge the timely input and suggestions of Dr. Ar-thur Hafner, Dean of the SHU Library and Professors Sister Anita Talar, AlanDelozier, Natalia Milsyzn, Beth Bloom, Richard Stern and Anthony Lee during thecourse of this study.

[Haworth indexing entry note]: “Library Materials Budget Allocation Strategy for a Mid-Size Academic Li-brary: A Case Study.” Kalyan, Sulekha. Published in The Acquisitions Librarian (The Haworth InformationPress, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.) No. 29, 2003, pp. 119-131. Single or multiple copies of this articleare available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.(EST). E-mail address: docdelivery@haworthpress.com].

http://www.haworthpress.com/store/product.asp?sku=J101 2003 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

10.1300/J101v15n29_10 119

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faced by academic libraries. In this paper, the author has tried to arrive at anallocation formula that takes into account the constant and variable factorsthat would determine the strength of the library collections. This formula isflexible enough to be applicable to a budget of any amount in a small to me-dium size library. The formula was successfully applied by the Seton HallUniversity Library to distribute new grant money from the National Endow-ment for the Humanities (NEH), as well as to the whole Library materialsbudget, with some modifications. [Article copies available for a fee from TheHaworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address:<docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2003by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Academic libraries, materials budget, acquisitions, allo-cations formula, library collections

BACKGROUND

Allocating funds for library materials used to be a simple exercisewhere “history plus increment” was the standard allocation approach forany new funds. The most important criterion that libraries used to preparethe next year’s budget was serials price inflation. As library collectionsbudgets are squeezed by the emergence of electronic resources, prolifera-tion of periodicals, and increasing cost of print resources, especially insciences, allocation of funds has assumed growing importance and in-creased complexity. The libraries have struggled to find the most equita-ble and justifiable ways of allocating the funds to different academicareas. The basic idea behind an allocation formula was to develop anopen system that allows fair distribution of funds determined by a num-ber of variables, which distinguish departments from each other. But thiscan be a very complex and politically charged process. Its use reflects theneed to allocate limited resources on the basis of equity and need.

As more and more libraries have used the allocation formula, a num-ber of factors that make the disbursing of new funds more objectivewere identified, including full-time equivalent (FTE) students and fac-ulty, number of credit hours taught, addition of new programs, inter-dis-ciplinary degree and books/serials costs. The allocation formula shouldtake into account the emerging academic priorities of the institution. AsLowry has emphasized in his article, libraries should reconcile pragma-tism, equity and need in the formula allocation of materials budget.1However, the allocation formula cannot be applied to the whole materi-

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als budget. The materials budget of a library supports a number of otherimportant general activities, such as reference materials, interlibraryloan, electronic resources and equipments, and membership fees.

Several reports on the health of academic libraries have indicatedthat the library materials budget has not been keeping pace with serialscost inflation and the increasing demand for extra resources from thestudents and the faculty.2-4 Partly, this is due to the introduction ofweb-based electronic resources and the new technology needed to sup-port them. The assumption was that subscribing to electronic resourceswould help in reducing the library materials budget to manageable lev-els. Most of the libraries have embraced this new information deliveryformat because of its ease of use in bibliographic search and immediateaccess to full-text articles. The librarians look at it as a potential sourceof savings in the future, when this new form of information deliverywould completely replace print format. But in the short term, this hasnot resulted in the expected savings. Instead, due to archival difficulties,the libraries are forced to keep materials in both formats–print as well aselectronic.1,2 To keep pace with increased cost of the serials subscrip-tion, libraries were forced to reduce their number of journal subscrip-tions. As libraries compromised the level of services provided,librarians grew frustrated at not being able to maintain basic services.

Like other academic libraries, the SHU library allocated its materialsfund using a rudimentary formula, which was based upon adding infla-tion cost to the previous year’s budget and the total number of graduateand undergraduate FTE students in a department. Over a period of time,this became unsatisfactory because it could not cope with rapid growth insome departments and declines in others. In addition, this model couldnot accommodate the resource requirements of new programs. In order toaddress this deficiency, the Dean of the University Library formed a “Li-brary Allocation Task Team” with the author as the chairperson. Thecharge of the task team was to devise an allocation formula or model forequitable distribution of funds among all academic disciplines.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Review of the literature showed that libraries have used several dif-ferent approaches in materials budget allocations. Allen5 concludedfrom his survey that most librarians are continuing to allocate materialsbudgets in a traditional manner–i.e., base their allocation simply on theprevious year’s history. About 40% of those who responded to the sur-

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vey mentioned that their libraries use allocation formulae. It is interest-ing to note that libraries further differ in their approach to determiningthe kinds of materials the allocation is applied to. For example, some li-braries used formulas only for journal allocations, while the others in-clude monographs also.

Roanoke College’s Fintel Library2 used a simple formula based on twofactors: average title cost and circulation use for a given department; thisformula in turn was based on an earlier formula published by WilliamMcGrath in 1975.6 The MSV University in California7 devised a formulafor allocating funds for monographs and periodicals based on five factors:enrollment, calendar courses, materials circulated, monograph costs, andcontinuation costs. Component values of these factors were averaged tocalculate the final allocations. General and reference materials were not in-cluded in these allocations. The University of Western Australia Library8

allocates their budget according to a formula based on staff and studentnumbers and the average cost of books and serials. Funds for serials andbooks are distributed in a ratio of 65:35. Five percent (5%) of the total fundis allocated for document delivery. The University of Maryland Libraries9

feels that the allocation formula cannot be used for the entire materials bud-get. For instance, reference materials, special collections, government doc-uments, and processing expenses fall outside the scope of the formulaallocation. In her article, Promis10 describes a strategy for allocating the in-formation access budget based on data regarding the needs of library users.She further states that allocation should be based on data that are compara-ble across all disciplines. Promis established a needs assessment projectand compiled a database on departmental information such as number offaculty and their ranks, number of students, actual usage statistics of the li-brary materials, and data on serials and book cost. These databases couldbe updated regularly and would be used for future allocations.

Sorgenfrei11 recommends that “[a] library planning to use an alloca-tion formula should have control of its budget. The budget should be de-veloped to help, not hinder library progress. The library shouldexperiment with the formula and it should be evaluated and reviewedperiodically.” Similarly, German and Schmidt12 emphasized in their ar-ticle that the perfect allocation model would be flexible and contain suf-ficient quantifiable data to allow the library to commute annualallocations fairly easily. Johnson13 advises libraries that “using statisti-cal information and hard data helps develop a budget proposal thatinforms without whining. A good proposal explains how the library hascoped with materials costs in the past and is planning for the future.”Southwest Texas State University14 redesigned their allocations for-

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mula in an attempt to allocate monetary resources fairly and equitably.Their new formula is based on an objective and systematic methodrather than on a political and historical precedence. Faculty was in-volved in assessing the needs of library users and in quantifying mone-tary departmental allocations.

INSTITUTION BACKGROUND

Seton Hall University is a mid-size private institution with a total enroll-ment of approximately 9,000 students; about 30% of them are graduate stu-dents.4 The university offers a wide ranging curriculum and is organizedinto eight schools and colleges–Arts and Science, Business, Education,Nursing, Diplomacy, Theology, Graduate Medical Education, and Law.The University Library serves a diverse community of graduate and under-graduate students as well as faculty members. The library has a collectionof approximately 500,000 volumes in books and serials. In addition, as of2001, the library also subscribes to 1,776 print periodicals and provides ac-cess to more than 9,000 e-journals in full-text through thirteen web-baseddatabases to support the research and teaching needs of the university. Theannual materials budget is about $1 million.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

The SHU Libraries recently received a surplus of grant money fromthe NEH to be used for purchase of monographs in the humanities. Thiswas new money added to the library’s materials budget, which will likelygrow in the future and be available for a long period of time. The Dean ofthe Library constituted a task team–Acquisition Task Team for the Hu-manities–with a charge to identify key acquisitions in the areas of history,literature, philosophy and other humanities disciplines. The main recom-mendation of this task team was that the best way to distribute this moneyequitably among all disciplines would be to develop an allocation for-mula. A new subcommittee–Acquisition Allocation Task Team–headedby the author and assisted by three library faculty members, was assignedthis task. The goal of this team was to develop a set of factors with as-signed weightage to be used in the formula. It was decided that the alloca-tion formula should be flexible enough to be applicable to any new fundsthat may become available to the annual materials budget.

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FINDINGS OF ACQUISITION ALLOCATION TASK TEAM

As mentioned above, this Team was appointed in January 1999 towork on developing an algorithmic model for equitable distribution ofthe library’s materials budget among various University Departments.After holding several meetings with selector librarians and members ofthe library administration, the committee identified the following fac-tors for derivation of the allocation formula:

• Six variable factors–FTE undergraduate students, FTE graduatestudents, certificate programs run by the department, total numberof credit hours, FTE faculty, and new programs added.

• Quality of collection of a given discipline should also be con-sidered. Thus, the seventh variable of need-based collectionassessment was added.

• Each of the first six variables was allotted a weightage factor on a1 to 10 scale, depending upon the importance given to each variable.

• The seventh factor–the need-based collection assessment–was as-signed on a 1 to 5 scale as described below. This was intended toenhance collections in those areas which librarians felt were weakand needed improvement.

• In addition, the committee decided to add another category ofequal-share value for all departments, which was typically 0.5% ofthe total available budget to each department. This factor was in-tended to help those departments which are inter-disciplinary in na-ture and did not have significant data variables of their own, such asWomen’s Studies and Anthropology, which would do poorly in thisallocation formula without the addition of this provision.

DEVELOPMENT OF ALLOCATION FORMULA

Materials budget subject to allocation formula: The SHU Library has anumber of fixed expenditures; these include costs for equipment, serviceand maintenance cost, interlibrary loan, bindery and general databases,such as ABI/Inform from ProQuest. These fixed costs were subtractedfrom the total materials budget of the Library, and the remaining budgetwas available for distribution according to the allocation formula. The costof subject-specific databases was charged to its corresponding department.For example, subscription costs for the nursing journals’ full-text databasefrom ProQuest was added to the Nursing Department’s allocated budget.

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Sources for raw data for variables: Data for the first five variablesgiven below were taken from the Seton Hall University Fact Book forFall 2000. Data on new programs were taken from the University Aca-demic Policy Core Curriculum Committee. The seventh factor repre-senting need-based assessment was assigned by the Liaison Librariansbased on their knowledge of collections in their designated areas.

Description of data variables: The following seven variables used inthe formula are as described below:

a. Undergraduate full-time equivalent (FTE) students: This variablerepresents the total number of full-time undergraduate studentsenrolled in each department. Each FTE was weighted as 1; twopart-time students were counted as one FTE.

b. (b1, b2): Graduate FTE students: This variable represents the totalnumber of graduate students enrolled in Master’s and Ph.D. pro-grams. Because their curriculum is so research-intensive, eachgraduate student in a Master’s program (b1) was weighted as 2and each student in Ph.D. program (b2) was weighted as 2.5.

c. Certificate programs: This variable represents total number ofstudents enrolled in short-term certificate programs. To compen-sate for the low enrollment in these programs, each student in thecertificate programs was weighted as 1.5.

d. Credit hours taught: Data on total credit hours taught by each de-partment during the fall semester are used. This variable includesboth undergraduate and graduate hours. Each credit hour wasweighted as 1.

e. FTE faculty: This variable represents the total number of full-timeequivalent faculty in each department. Each FTE was weighted as 1.

f. New programs: This variable represented the number of new pro-grams introduced during the past two years by a department. Dueto the lack of data for them, a default weightage of 10 was givenfor each new program.

h. Need-based assessment of collection: This was an arbitrarynumber assigned by the respective Liaison Librarians based ontheir assessment of the collection. The collection was rated from 1to 5, where 1 represented the satisfactory collection and 5 repre-sented an inadequate collection requiring improvement. In caseswhere librarians did not respond, the committee decided to assignassessment value by using its best judgment.

Construction of allocation formula: This formula was derived afterapplying weight factors to the raw data.

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Composite value, denoted as Wi, for an individual department wascalculated by using the following formula:

Wi = (a + b1 + b2 + c + d + e + f) h

Composite values of all departments were added together to arrive at atotal composite value denoted as Wt.

Percent allocation (A%) for each department was calculated by thefollowing formula:

A% = Wi / Wt × 100

Total percent allocation for all departments should add to 100.A department’s final allocated available budget = Fund calculated

from percent allocation (A%) + fixed amount from equal-share value.

APPLICATION OF ALLOCATION FORMULA

Experience with NEH grant fund: Initially, a pilot study was under-taken to develop an allocation formula for the NEH grant that was tar-geted for a specific purpose. Funds available under this grant werelimited to the purchase of monographs in humanities-related subjects.These monies could not be used for the purchase of any other kinds ofmaterials, such as periodicals, CD-ROMs or databases. There are 13humanities departments in the University which were entitled to thisfund. The budget was approximately $200,000, which had to be usedwithin a short period of time. Since there was enough money to distrib-ute, the committee came up with a simple formula based on undergradu-ate and graduate enrollment, number of courses and programs offeredby each department. In this formula, additional weightage was given tothe graduate factors including enrollment, total courses offered and pro-grams. On the surface, this formula looked equitable and fair to all con-cerned departments. However, it was noticed that a few disciplines thatdid not have significant enrollments received little or no funding underthis formula. Thus, it was decided to give equal-share value to each de-partment irrespective of the enrollment level as has been describedabove.

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Application of allocation formula for whole Library materials bud-get: The total Library materials budget supports not only the purchaseof monographs and serials, but also funds continuation of periodicalsubscriptions, general databases, specific databases, interlibrary loan,copying services, bindery, etc. It was realized that the allocation for-mula developed for the NEH grant was too basic to be applicable for thewhole Library collection, because it did not take into account factorssuch as new programs, the quality of collections in particular areas andbudget constraints. This prompted the Task Force to modify the NEHallocation formula described above, keeping in mind all the concernsmentioned here. As described in the Development of Allocation For-mula, a total of seven factors were included within the formula.

Table 1 shows the weighted data calculated from raw data of allseven variables considered for each department. The composite score(Wi) for each department was calculated by adding the values for the firstsix variables and by multiplying the total by the need-based assessmentvalue. These values were converted into percentages, which could beapplied to funding. The percentage values were calculated by dividingeach discipline’s composite score by the collective composite score ofall disciplines and multiplying the sum by 100.

Based upon the principle that a certain fixed amount of funding wasnecessary for an academic discipline regardless of the number of stu-dents in the program, a minimum dollar amount of 0.5% was set asidefor each department. This equal-share value was added to the allocatedamount calculated from the formula.

The distribution of funds among the thirty-one departments of theuniversity is shown in Table 1. It is clear from the table that the vari-ables which boosted the funding of a department were related to thegraduate program and the need-based assessment. The two disciplinesthat received the bulk of the funding were Education and Business.These disciplines, in fact, represent the two most important graduateand undergraduate programs of the University, and each of them hasseveral independent departments. A few departments with no under-graduate enrollment such as the Center for Public Services, GraduateMedical Education, and Women’s Studies benefited heavily by gettingthe high score of five in the need-based assessment factor. Since hu-manities-related disciplines received a significant amount of funds fromthe NEH grant, they were assigned a low need-based score of one. Thusthe money saved in the humanities areas was diverted to areas withmore pressing needs.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS

It is clear from this study that in order to arrive at an allocation for-mula it is important to identify factors which reflect the need of the de-partment as well as the changing priorities of the Institution. It tookmore than a year of constant discussion among librarians and adminis-tration, in addition to several revisions, to arrive at the formula describedin this paper. During deliberations, several factors came into lightwhich were not previously considered; some of these became importantcomponents of the formula.

• Changing priorities of the Universities. New programs introducedin the past two years were identified and were given high priorityto boost their collections.

• Collection evaluation for each discipline. The collections founddeficit were given high priority in the form of a need-based assess-ment. This factor became most important in boosting a depart-ment’s allocation due to fold-multiplication in the formula. A fewweak collection’s allocations were boosted by a factor of 2 to 5.

• Addition of fixed amount or equal-share value. A few departments,even with the most liberal weightage, still did not find enough allo-cation due to reasons mentioned above. This bias was removed byallocating a minimum amount of funds to all departments.

• Contingency funds. To further accommodate the changing priori-ties of the institution, a contingency fund of about 10% of the totalbudget, under the Dean’s discretion, was created.

It was felt by the Library administration that this formula fulfilled theneed of the library materials fund because it was flexible enough to ac-commodate any future changes. In addition, because its componentshave been put in Excel spreadsheet, the formula could easily be manipu-lated to apply to yearly budgets and to any new monies which becomeavailable to the Library. The author feels that this formula can be ap-plied to any small to medium-size library budget, after adding appropri-ate modifications.

REFERENCES

1. Lowry, Charles B. (1992) Reconciling pragmatism, equity and need in theformula allocation of book and serials funds. College and Research Libraries. 53(3),121-137.

2. Roanoke College Fintel Library (2001). Department budget allocationmethod. Website: http://www.roanoke.edu/Library/DeptBudgetAllocation.htm. UNO

130 ACQUISITION IN DIFFERENT AND SPECIAL SUBJECT AREAS

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Library. Collection Development Policy: Allocation of Library Materials Funds (2002).http://library.uno.edu/coll/allocation.html. University of West Florida Libraries (1999)Library Allocation Formula: http://www.lib.uef.edu/Acquisitions/formula.shtml.

3. Brownson, C.W. (1991). Modeling library materials expenditure: initial ex-periments at Arizona State University. Lib. Res. & Tech. Services, 35, (1), 87-101.

4. Pitkin, G. M. (1996). Strategic planning and the allocation of library re-sources [at the University of Northern Colorado]. In The National Electronic Library,Greenwood Press, 159-166.

5. Allen, F. R. (1996). Materials budget in the electronic age: A Survey of Aca-demic Libraries. College and Research Libraries, 57 (2), 133-143.

6. McGrath, W. (1975). A pragmatic book allocation formula for academic andpublic libraries with a test for its effectiveness. Lib. Resources & Tech. Services, 19 (4).

7. Policy for Acquisitions Allocations (1998) http://www.msvu.ca/library/acqform.htm.

8. The University of Western Australia Library (March 2000)–Information re-sources budget formula. http://www.library.uwa.edu.au/collection/acquisitions/formula.html.

9. University of Maryland Libraries (Octobet 29, 1999): The general back-ground on formula allocation. http://www.lib.umd.edu/CLMD/formula/bkgrnd.html.

10. Promis, P. (1996). Developing a data based budget allocation strategy: TheUniversity of Arizona Library Experience. Collection Building, 15 (3), 5-9.

11. Sorgenfrei, Robert. (1999). Slicing the pie: Implementing and living with ajournal allocation formula. Library Collections, Acquisitions and Technical Services,23 (1), 39-45.

12. German, L. B. and Schmidt, K. A. (2001). Finding the right balance: campusinvolvement in the collections allocation process. Library Collections, Acquisitions,and Tech. Services, 25 (4), 421-433.

13. Johnson, P. (1995). Preparing materials budget requests. Technicalities, 15 (4),7-10.

14. Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas (2002). Calculation ofdepartmental allocations for library materials by the University Library. Library/Oper-ating Letter (OL) no. 06.02. http://www.library.swt.edu/admin%2Dserv/lib%2Dol/dept%2Dalloc.asp.

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