Borrow or Buy?

Halloween, 2009 marked the start of a new experiment at HPL.  You see, despite a good effort, we don't have everything every patron wants exactly when they want it.  We tend to borrow 3,000 to 4,000 items per year from other libraries on behalf of our patrons.  This is a very expensive process, both in monetary terms and in terms of staff time.  Don't get me wrong though.  I think that interlibrary loan (ILL, for short), is a fabulous service.  It expands an individual library's collection far beyond what it could ever be by itself.  The trade-off is that it is sometimes more expensive than simply purchasing an item and adding it to the local collection.

For quite a long time, HPL has struggled with how to decide when to purchase or when to borrow an item a patron requests.  In this time of tight budgets and great uncertainty, we have decided that it makes more sense than ever to try and solve the puzzle.  So, we are going to use a function of Google documents, Google forms, along with a slightly modified process to try a new way of getting what our patrons want.  Our new internal process inserts the collection development staff ahead of the ILL staff.  If the collection staff decides something requested would be of value in our collection, we will buy the item instead of getting it on loan.  If the item requested doesn't fit with our collection or collection policy, then we'll borrow it instead.  The ultimate goal is to shape HPL's collection in a way that more closely reflects our community.

Here's how the thinking goes:  I did a little bit of calculating and came up with a conservative figure of $16 as the average cost for HPL to borrow an item through ILL.  That represents an average of $12 for staff time, $3 postage, and $1 packing material.  Obviously then, if a patron requests an item in the $12-$15 range or lower, it is more cost effective to buy the item than get it on loan, even if we don't expect the book will get checked out more than that one time.  If we buy the item and it goes out several times, we've both saved money and improved the collection.  Even if we buy something that costs double that $16 threshold, the item would only need to get checked out one more time after the initial check out for us to break even.

I think we will finally be putting the horse out in front of the cart with this change.  We will test this process over the next few weeks, refining as we go.  With luck, the experiment will not disrupt normal service in any noticable way.  With a little more luck, we will improve the collection and maybe save some money in the process.