I have been asked to
try and find out how other institutions charge for services
provided.
Our Admin Rules
require us to charge $1.25 per letter size page for photocopying and mailing, or
$2.50 per page for FAXing. Technically this is for library card holders
only, as the Rules specify charging the fees to the requestor's library
card. We also have a $60/hour Custom Research fee, which is not
specifically defined.
I just received a
request from a university professor from another state, requesting copies of
more than 20 articles from our local papers, so the question was: Is this
simply retrieval and copying, or does the number of copies requested in one
letter make this more of a research type request. Based on the time
estimate to find the cited articles and copy them, the Research fee was
favorably considered, but then we decided to go with a straight retrieval and
copying fee.
But this brought up
the question of how other libraries handle these requests, and if you do have an
hourly charge for research, how do you keep track of the time spent fulfilling
the request? What time does the research start, and when does it
end? When the last copy comes out, or when all the administrative
paperwork is completed?
Individual responses
to me directly at: charlesk@librarieshawaii.org are fine, since this is
just for in-house discussion. I will keep all responders anonymous for
these discussion purposes.
Charles L. King
Serials Librarian
Hawaii State
Library
478 South King Street
Honolulu, HI 96813-2994
http://www.hspls.org/serials/serials.html