From: "Plutchak, T Scott" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2017 23:02:50 +0000

The question comes up from time to time.  Several years ago, when I
was still directing the Lister Hill Library at UAB, I did an analysis
to calculate what percentage of fte would be freed up if I no longer
had people spending time negotiating licenses and managing invoices.
At the time our total fte was about 50.  I don’t have the detailed
analysis ready to hand, but the fte that would be freed up was fewer
than 5.  This was for a relatively large biomedical library, but I
have no reason to think the percentages would be appreciably different
for general academic libraries of whatever size.  While paying for
toll access occupies a significant portion of the library’s budget, it
occupies a much smaller percentage of the activity of the librarians
and paraprofessionals.

For example, the reference/instructional/liaison librarians (as they
may be variously called) would be freed of the annoyance of badgering
the selectors for some obscure journal that the faculty they’re
working with apparently need, but otherwise their work would be
scarcely affected.  Working with faculty & students one-on-one or in a
variety of class settings would continue just as it does now.  Working
to promote information literacy from the undergraduate level on, and
being deeply involved in the research workflows, is independent of
whether the institution is paying for access to a particular resource.

The systems librarians & staff would be somewhat impacted, but
managing access restrictions at the system level, tedious and annoying
though it may be, is still far from the total of systems activity.
Website development, incorporating new workflow & discovery tools and
integrating them with the institution’s other automated systems will
continue, particularly at libraries that invest more in open source
systems than in proprietary solutions.

Many libraries are investing more in data curation activities and I
would suspect that any fte savings would likely be shifted in that
direction.

Even the library catalog and associated tools would be affected less
than it might seem from the outside.  A couple of decades ago, the
catalog was an inventory of what the library owned.  But with the rise
of consortial purchasing, state-wide licensing and the ability to
access freely available resources of many types, that hasn’t been true
in most libraries for a long time.  Now the “catalog” is an organizing
tool, used (sometimes well, sometimes poorly) to provide direction for
the institution’s faculty, students and staff in their quest to get to
the resources they need.

The goal of the library is to connect people to the resources they
need for the work they’re trying to do.  Paying for access to some of
those resources has always been an important means, but even as that
occupies less and less time, the goal becomes no less important and
challenging.

I could go on, but my dinner date is waiting.

Scott