2016 Charleston Library Conference

Libraries are increasingly concerned with demonstrating the return on investment for collection budgets. But little thought is given to defining the investment itself. The investment can identified simply as the expenditures in given areas or types of material. But are their more fundamental ways of thinking about this investment? There are and we need to give them consideration both in calculating and publicizing our returns on investment and in meeting the requirements of the auditors who monitor and certify our business practices.

In 2013, our auditors came to the realization that their practices still assumed collections consisting solely of tangible objects - print journals, books, indexes, microforms, and so forth - and needed to address the digital collection that contained a varied mixture of owned and leased titles. Library staff in charge of business operations, acquisitions, and collection development responded by developing practices and procedures to identifying assets and non-assets and allow the auditors both to understand how identifications were made and to verify the identifications are correct.

Participants in this session will hear how we developed new practices and procedures in response to our auditors' demands. We will describe our identification of contracts language that translates into such identifications and allows auditors to verify our judgments. The participants will also learn how our increased awareness of such distinction has lead us to see our collections in ways divorced from the assumptions of the print environment.