Acquisitions Budget FY13 Overview

The Western Libraries aims to support your research and curricular needs through its acquisitions and interlibrary loan budgets. For the 2012-13 academic year, Western Libraries will be more than doubling the amount we allocate for purchasing books over what we were able to offer last year. In addition to allocating more of our funds to purchasing books, we have also received special one-time funds from the Provost for purchasing eBooks.

Ordering books will be the same as last year; simply login to your ILLiad account and let us know that the item is to be purchased. In addition, library liaisons will utilize a segment of the budget to order materials that fill in gaps in our collection and address emerging needs that need better representation within our collections.  Here are further details:

• Our budget for books and other one-time purchases for 2012-2013 will be $185,282. See Acquisitions Budget FY13 for further details.

• The Provost has allocated $30,000 for us to purchase additional eBooks. Our other major eBook initiative is through the ongoing project administered by the Orbis Cascade Alliance. To access these eBooks, simply go to the Library Catalog and search either for a particular book or within a subject heading. Once you find a book you are looking for, click on the link to online access. Our eBooks can be accessed by multiple users at the same time and can also be assigned to Course Reserves. Also see the eBooks page for more information.

• If you do not find a book that you are looking for within our catalog, you can request that it be purchased. Simply login to your ILLiad account, go to the form for requesting a book, and indicate that this is for purchase.

• In order to balance our budget for this year and to have additional funds for books, we cancelled some subscriptions last year as part of an ongoing subscription review. The subscriptions cancelled all had a cost per use of more than $100, meaning that it is a better use of our limited funds to order individual articles from that publication than to subscribe to it. For any journal that we do not subscribe to, you can order articles via ILLiad by logging into your ILLiad account and going to the article request form.

Budget realities and ongoing changes in the business of academic publishing require that the Western Libraries continuously review its acquisitions budget in order to make the most effective use of its limited funding. To that end, the Western Libraries employ data driven decision-making in its commitment to providing the access to resources that you need.