HIGHLIGHTS - June, 2002, MONTHLY REPORT
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Materials Budget
Final details of the materials budget are now in place. The budget received a permanent reduction of 3.5% which was returned to the University. In addition, the serials cut will be finalized at 3% for the year. SER is working on the titles marked for cancellation now.
CAC approved the fund specific allocations at its meeting on 6/27/02 and Exec approved those on 7/1/02. The base monograph allocations are the same for most funds and the one time allocations which were provided in FY02 and have provided again for FY03. This will enable the monograph budget support the expanded approval plan and give much needed relief to subjects which are most dependent on monograph literature.
Money has been earmarked for continued growth in purchasing electronic resources, funds have been realized to absorb costs for resources eliminated at the OhioLINK level, and contingency funds have been put in place to address mid-year budget cuts should those occur.
I believe this is one of the best outcomes we could have anticipated earlier in the year when inflation and budget cuts loomed very large. This budget will also allow us to move forward for another year without any devastating consequences to the materials budget.
TSAA is working the Accounts Payable and IT to develop an interface between the Felix/OSCAR accounting system and the University's PeopleSoft system. This project will allow us to transmit payment requests from OSCAR for the materials budget directly into the PeopleSoft system without rekeying. OSUL will absorb the costs for the software needed from III and Accounts Payable will pay for the programming costs. We do not know how long the development process will take.
OSU now in top tier for record ownership at OhioLINK -- Through the leadership of Noelle Van Pulis and Tschera Connell, our past and current reps to the OhioLINK DMSC, DMSC has reviewed our position in the hierarchy for ownership of records in the central catalog. In the past we were in the second tier which meant our records could be replaced in the central catalog if one of the first tier libraries submitted the same record. Our previous position in tier 2 was because we did not do authority work on MeSH headings. In recent years, we have reinstituted authority work for MeSH headings as part of our ongoing authority work in the Cataloging Dept. As a result, OhioLINK has concurred that we should now be a first tier library for this purpose. We are delighted the fine quality cataloging which is done throughout Technical Services and other areas such as Music and Language and Area Studies will now be showcased more regularly in the central catalog.