Losing Your Control: Acquisitions and Outsourcing

Abstract

Faced with a flat budget over the past five years, the acquisitions unit at Southern Illinois University's Morris Library has sought alternative schemas to save staff time and money. One decision was to begin a trial run of outsourcing the monographic processing procedures. During this five month trial, acquisitions staff tracked the number of books funneled into the process, vendor error rate, cost, and the work-flow changes regulated by the process. From this tracking, we hoped to determine and evaluate the trade-offs between the money and staff time saved and the costs/benefits gleaned from outsourcing the pre-processing of our monographs.