Abstract

Maintaining a sustainable materials budget in academic libraries remains a challenging task, as it’s not only affected by constant pressures of flat funding and increasing annual costs but is also subject to timely invoicing and accurate documentation of budget allocations and expenditures. At George A. Smathers Libraries at University of Florida (UF), developing the annual materials budget allocation is an extensive process that begins in November/December with a rough estimate derived from prior-year final expenditure figures. As the year progresses and expenditure commitments increase, the allocations estimate becomes more precise, and it culminates in August/September after a successful completion of the budget rollover. This paper describes an end-of-the-year methodology initiated by the Acquisitions & Collections Services Department (ACS) to ensure full payment of materials budget expenditure commitments, along with a timely budget rollover. This effort was to close the fiscal year with the maximum expenditures paid in order to set the foundation for developing the most accurate allocations for the next fiscal year. The focus of the paper is on electronic resources (e-resources) expenditures, which represents the highest percentage of the overall library materials budget. Simultaneously, this paper reveals the “serendipitous” application of Scrum—an agile project management framework to our end-of-the-year approach. An analysis of our methodology from a project-focused perspective revealed that many of our processes “serendipitously” mirrored those of the Scrum framework. Going forward, we plan to intentionally implement the complete Scrum framework in our end-of-the-year approach, in order to fully benefit from this methodology.

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“Scrumming” the Library Materials Budget: A Serendipitous Application of an Agile Project Management Framework

Maintaining a sustainable materials budget in academic libraries remains a challenging task, as it’s not only affected by constant pressures of flat funding and increasing annual costs but is also subject to timely invoicing and accurate documentation of budget allocations and expenditures. At George A. Smathers Libraries at University of Florida (UF), developing the annual materials budget allocation is an extensive process that begins in November/December with a rough estimate derived from prior-year final expenditure figures. As the year progresses and expenditure commitments increase, the allocations estimate becomes more precise, and it culminates in August/September after a successful completion of the budget rollover. This paper describes an end-of-the-year methodology initiated by the Acquisitions & Collections Services Department (ACS) to ensure full payment of materials budget expenditure commitments, along with a timely budget rollover. This effort was to close the fiscal year with the maximum expenditures paid in order to set the foundation for developing the most accurate allocations for the next fiscal year. The focus of the paper is on electronic resources (e-resources) expenditures, which represents the highest percentage of the overall library materials budget. Simultaneously, this paper reveals the “serendipitous” application of Scrum—an agile project management framework to our end-of-the-year approach. An analysis of our methodology from a project-focused perspective revealed that many of our processes “serendipitously” mirrored those of the Scrum framework. Going forward, we plan to intentionally implement the complete Scrum framework in our end-of-the-year approach, in order to fully benefit from this methodology.