Due to budget constraints, the only additions to the collection were curricular required purchases ($7,637). We did avoid any cancellations.
Donations:
10 accepted items with an approximate value of $600.39. Donor activity is reported annually to our Advancement Office.
Product improvements:
We conducted our annual review of our owned monographs as compared to the curated lists of core titles. This is cross referenced against Lakehead and Laurentian’s holdings as well. Gaps were identified in every core subject area both in terms of bringing older editions up to date and purchasing books we don’t have but should. The cost of bringing our monograph collection up to date at the time of the evaluation was approximately $150,000.
The collection budget received an inflationary indexing for 2014-2015. The graph below separates the expenditures between online databases, serials and monographs (both print and electronic). The licensed resources are core curricular, and all a-la-carte spending is allocated to purchase required curricular resources. All other collection growth is frozen. Upwards of 90% of the licensed resources costs are in US dollars.
Increases received over the past couple of years have addressed inflation, but have not stretched to ensure normal growth of the collection. In this context we define growth as the addition of new titles to our book or e-book collection in a given subject area.
For example, our partner universities and colleagues in the academic health sciences world see budget allocations to growth at around 10%-15% of the total collections budget. Our allocation to growth in 2014-2015 was 1%.
We also faced additional pressures from the lower exchange rate for the US dollar.
