> Your direct labor costs can be readily measured.  Your opportunity cost is
> obscure.

One of the standard mistakes we make in libraries, IMHO, is that we measure
what's easy to measure and ignore what's hard to measure, even when what's
hard to measure is more important.  I would suggest that direct labor costs
-- though easily measurable -- are much less important than opportunity
cost, which may not be measurable in exact units but can be enormous.  I
don't have to be able to measure opportunity cost in units to know that one
staff-hour spent on print management is a staff-hour not spent on
online-resource management.  At my institution, usage of printed materials
has been falling rapidly for more than a decade, while usage of online
materials has been skyrocketing over the same period.  If (as I do) I
consider control to be a means to the end of patron service rather than an
end in itself, then I should probably consider sacrificing some control of
low-use print in favor of greater control of high-use online.  But that's me
and my institution.  Your mileage may vary.

> Your aggregate investment in man-hours will decline as your portfolio of
> subscriptions declines.  There are not any sunk costs associated with the mere
> adoption of the procedure.

You're right.  The cost associated with the adoption of any procedure is
almost entirely opportunity cost.  See above.

> Not remarking issues as they arrive and failing to make periodic complaints to
> your agency over issues not delivered is an indication that you have, in a
> rough-and-ready way, elected to write-off part of the inventory for which you
> have paid. 

That's technically correct, but misleadingly phrased.  To put it more
accurately: I cease traditional check-in and claiming practices if I
determine that those practices have an insufficient impact on patron service
to justify them, especially when higher-impact activities are waiting in the
wings.  Traditional claiming has a real-world impact on far fewer issues
than are actually claimed (it has no impact on those that would come whether
claimed or not, and none on those that will never come regardless of
claims).  Check-in creates records that have little or no real-world impact
on patron access (the fact, for example, that an issue has arrived doesn't
help a patron if the issue isn't on the shelf).  The creation of meaningless
and low-impact records would impose no meaningful opportunity cost if
higher-impact tasks were not available for staff to do.  But, in my
library's case anyway, they are.  That's the argument for doing away with
check-in -- not that check-in isn't valuable, but that it isn't valuable
enough.

--
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library
Univ. of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu
(801) 721-1687