In my last post, I promised to point out some of the research systems and services that libraries are deploying and how they directly benefit faculty and students. Today, I'll discuss an effort at Laurentian University to provide more transparency to our institution over the use of our collection development funds and to improve the ability of our library users to track new arrivals.

Academic libraries spend significant effort and a considerable portion of their budget on building their collection to support the learning, teaching, and research needs of their parent institution. There are various models for faculty/librarian collaboration on the selection of collection materials: some libraries distribute a department's library collection budget between individual faculty members, while other libraries centralize all selection authority with subject librarians. Our library allows librarians to work out their own collection development collaboration model with their departments. For my part, I strive to understand my faculty's individual research interests and to anticipate the directions that their discipline is headed to build a collection that meets current and future needs, while also attempting to address imbalances in the collection that might have accrued over time. With any collection development model, however, libraries need to be accountable to their departments for the choices that have been made.

When new collection materials are ordered, most library systems add a corresponding "on order" item to the library catalogue. Savvy library users may then be able to figure out that they can search for "on order" as an item status or item location in addition to their usual search terms to limit their results. When items are received, however, their status normally changes to a regular "available" status and the ability to search for recently acquired items is lost. I visited the home page of several university libraries in Ontario, and was able to determine that some other libraries are also trying to make it easier for users to find recently ordered or acquired items:

• Trent University offers a prominent link to a regularly generated static Web page that lists items that have been received since the last time the page was generated.
• The TriUniversity Group (TUG) of Guelph, Laurier, and Waterloo offer a New Items search that enables users to search for items received within the last one to four weeks.
• The University of Western produces lists of materials ordered within the last month that are searchable by keyword or browsable by campus library. They also enable users to create weekly alerts for recently ordered materials that get sent directly to their email account.

Until the 2008-2009 academic year, the J.N. Desmarais Library at Laurentian University followed the default model of simply adding "on order" items to the catalogue. Users could search for items in an "on order" location, but there was no explicit connection between the collection development budget that had been allocated to a given department and the items that had been funded by that budget. For 2008-2009, we decided to adopt a much more transparent approach our collection development decisions and began publishing publicly available collection development reports on a weekly basis. These reports mirror our library budgets, which are broken down by a per-department, per-material type, per-item language hierarchy. We make the allocated, encumbered, and paid budget amounts available for all to see - inside and outside the Laurentian University community. (An exception is made for licensed materials for which the contracts typically specify that the price paid for the license cannot be publicly disclosed; these funds cannot be viewed outside the Laurentian University community.) We recognize that there can be political consequences of exposing this data, particularly if departments feel that they deserve more of a piece of the collection development budget than they currently receive - but those conversations need to be held, and making the data as transparent as possible can only help facilitate those discussions.

For example, here is a screenshot of the Human Kinetics fund report, with the allocated, encumbered, and paid amounts for each fund:

List of Human Kinetics funds

At their most granular level, the collection development reports list each individual title that has been ordered for a given fund. The status of a given title must currently be inferred by whether it has a "paid" amount. When librarians at Laurentian University meet with the departments for which they have collection development responsibilities, we introduce the faculty to these reports; for the most part, the reaction has been positive. There is, of course, much more that we could do to enhance these reports or the related functionality behind the data; we could generate RSS feeds, send alerts by email when items for a particular fund are received or placed on order, etc, but for now we simply make the data for each report available in a CSV file so that it can be easily reused. As we are in the progress of moving to a new library system at Laurentian University, we have not invested much effort in the look and feel of these reports to bring them out of the CCCP era; we will have to recreate them once we move to the new system. Creating these reports has, however, helped us think about our requirements for the new system, and exposing this data to our users has raised their awareness of the amount of effort and resources we invest in our collection development process, and invited them to work with us to maximize the return on that investment.

Here is a screenshot of the Human Kinetics monograph (books) fund report, showing each title with a link to the catalog, and the estimated or actual price:

List of Human Kinetic books that have been ordered in the 2008-2009 academic year

Do you think your campus has a unique relationship between librarians and faculty? Does your library use tools or processes that ease library/faculty collaboration on collection development? Is Laurentian University's model of sharing collection development information too transparent, or do you think libraries need to go further? Feel free to comment and share your thoughts with your fellow readers!