An Academic Library's Efforts to Justify Materials Budget Expenditures

Academic libraries, like the universities and colleges they serve, are facing increasing pressures to justify budgets and expenditures. Using the business model employed at several other research institutions, the University of Florida (UF) has adopted the accounting system Responsibility Center Management (RCM) which necessitates the university's sixteen colleges to track their individual operational budgets including absorbing a revised tax levied to finance the library. This tax has created a renewed sense of urgency for the library to show details of the material budget expenditures for each college. This paper reveals how staff in the UF Library's Acquisitions Department developed a fresh mapping strategy to track costs of the traditional book budget, print serials, and other tangible materials, but also expenditures for all e-resources drilled down to the individual e-journals purchased through Big Deal packages. Going forward, the library can use this refashioned budget system to reallocate its materials budget to more accurately support the colleges of UF.