What About Technical Services?
A colleague e-mailed me the other day about my ROI numbers. Being a Cataloger, he pointed out that my technical services figures seem to be low, and as such I’d like to clarify a few things. This means presenting an updated figure. When I provided my time estimates they did not include weeding, sorting, shelving, or similar expenditures. I should make that clear.
Now, anyone who’s worked as a Cataloger knows that these “duties” can add a lot of time to processing. Additionally, it’s been pointed out that the Library of Congress identified an average cost per full record ($100 an item) several years ago. This is, more or less, backed up by references in the user community and a recently finished “Study of the North American MARC Records Marketplace.”
To revise my figures let’s do two things:
- Change the assumed time spent copy cataloging an item from 5 minutes to 10 minutes. This, then, accounts for weeding, sorting, and shelving.
- Disregard the time based approach to determining the value of original cataloging… and instead quantify it at $100 per record.
Based on these two changes, the ultimate revised number comes to $3,855 (assuming that 985 x 10 = 164.2 hours and 164.2 x $18.00 = $2955.00… plus 90 x $100.00 = $900.00).
The figure isin’t perfect, but it offers a larger number for those who think I lowballed my last set of calculations.
