Small organizations generally work with smaller budgets. Well, yes, of course, this makes sense. But these organizations must also deliver similar levels of resources and services as large organizations. An engineering program at a school with 350 students (Olin) must be able to provide its students and faculty with the databases and other materials necessary to support the mission of the school.
How can the small organizational budget be leveraged for maximum impact? Here are some tips:
- Most vendors and publishers will scale pricing for size and organization population. For example, since Olin has 350 students who are all undergraduates, we tend to be charged whatever the base rate is for a product.
- Not all vendors and publishers will scale pricing. When evaluating these products, how and when resources will be used becomes critical. Is a journal needed for a specific course that runs every other year? Then perhaps purchasing content on demand makes more sense than a subscription. Is the resource critical to the community? If so, think creatively about pricing. Do you belong to a consortium that offers discounts? Are there units on campus or in the community that could provide cost-sharing?
- Patron-Driven Acquisition (PDA) can help focus budget dollars. There are many excellent articles on this topic, and a current discussion can be found in The Scholarly Kitchen: The Scholarly Kitchen PDA. For me, PDA helps on two fronts: saves some staff time in the area of collection development and creates a highly targeted set of resources that the community has directly shaped.
- While most of us feel there is little to no wiggle room in our budgets, experimentation is essential. For example, two years ago we initiated a fairly aggressive journal evaluation and cut. We were not cutting to simply respond to overall budget changes. We wanted to make more material available to our community. By cutting individual titles, we were able to invest in an automated document delivery platform that would allow faculty to receive material on demand. The system would first check our holdings. If we actually owned an item, the faculty member would be notified. If we didn’t, then the faculty member could receive a copy of that article within minutes without staff intervention. We are using Infotrieve (Infotrieve) for this service. We continually evaluate the use and cost of automated document delivery to determine its ROI.
- Evaluate all of the players in a market, not just the major players. When Olin wanted to offer a Search platform, we checked out the major players. Then, through a phone call and a meeting at the Charleston Conference, I met the founder of a company I had not yet known: Deep Web Technologies (Deep Web Technologies/). In addition to a strong product, Deep Web does not sell content and does not have some of the conflicts of the other players. They worked with us to develop a custom solution that met our needs.
There are many ideas for leveraging budgets for maximum impact, and these are just a few. What are yours?
