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Article Excerpt
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Samford University Library
Negotiating for products and services can be a tricky business in the best of times. Information professionals and vendors might both make a knee-jerk assumption that in the worst of times--such as the economic downturn that crystallized in 2008--negotiation would become even more difficult. However, such an assumption is not necessarily accurate. Depending on the vantage point, times of economic stress can actually provide increased opportunities for negotiation. However, a constricting economy always requires special consideration when negotiating or renegotiating contracts for products and services.
The literature is flooded with articles about the troubled economy. Mary Ellen Bates notes in her March 2009 Searcher article, "Living Large in Lean Times" (pp. 22-27), "It's getting so that I am afraid to open the morning paper. I can always seem to count on at least one headline with bad news about the economy." Hear, hear, Ms. Bates. The media has hyped our economic meltdown to the hilt, making it difficult not to become paralyzed with fear. While the press release about the Springer-Elsevier-Wiley (SPEW) merger was a 2009 April Fool's Day joke [http:// scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/04/01/mergers-create-uberpublisher], the reality of increased vendor and publisher mergers and content transfers among publishers is no laughing matter. Economic horrors are very real, such as the South Carolina General Assembly reducing the funding for the PASCAL (Partnership Among South Carolina's Academic Libraries) Statewide Electronic Library programming by 90% [http://pascalsc.org/content/view/173/1].
When asked if she had experienced this sort of economic downturn over the course of her career in the information industry, Jane Burke, vice president, Serials Solutions, emphasized that we need to guard against becoming too frightened by media hype. While there is no doubt that the salad days are over and serious times call for serious people, seriousness does not necessarily mean we have to follow the Chicken Little policies of panic. Times are tough, but the sky is not really falling.
In our two previous Searcher articles, we have explored negotiation as it relates to information professionals, offering advice from library leaders and vendors as well as an examination of the intersection between consortia and negotiation (January 2009 and March 2009, respectively). In this third installment of "The Art of the Deal," we will explore how these tough economic times--or TET, as Roy Tennant, senior program officer for OCLC Research, says the folks at OCLC are calling it (1)--affect the information professional's ability to negotiate for products and services.
Whether libraries face unprecedented financial difficulties depends on the library itself. Academic libraries saw a similar crisis in the 1990s when journal prices soared. Universally, K-12 and public libraries may be dealing with budget crises of truly anomalous magnitude. Regardless, our intent here is not to offer a detailed analysis of past, present, and possible future economic woes. We'll leave that to the economists in the crowd. Instead, this article will specifically discuss negotiation scenarios, strategies, and opportunities within the framework of shrinking or nonexistent budgets.
The Glass Is Half-Full ...
When budgets become tight, the instinct is often to batten down the hatches and hold tight to what one has. Before the battening commences, however, tight budgets can actually empower librarians to determine--internally and externally--just what the critical products and services are and perhaps make some long-needed changes. For example, the "dis-integration" of the integrated library system (ILS), as well as the general unsuitability of the ILS to manage electronic products and services, has been a hot topic of late. Librarians are often in the undesirable position of maintaining a fleet of products to manage their print and electronic collections--the ILS, the electronic resource management system, the link resolver, federated search tools, the next-generation discovery tool, and more. When a budget is slashed by 5%, 10%, 20%, or more, this multi-tool scheme morphs from undesirable to unfeasible. Thus, what was once unthinkable--jettisoning parts of the traditional ILS--becomes thinkable, and the library has made an evolutionary jump forward.
In essence, the librarian determines the library's core mission and negotiates what tools are necessary to meet that mission. Is it more important to facilitate linking via the link resolver or to check in and claim print serials? Is it possible to relegate some acquisitions work to a centralized purchasing office--such as those that exist on many college campuses--and thus free staff time and budget...
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