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