Lister Hill Letter
Newsletter of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at UAB

May/June 1999

$ $ $ SHOW  ME  THE  MONEY  $ $ $

Often our customers ask us how we decide what price to charge for a photocopy or Interlibrary Loan.  It's not magic or done on a whim.  There is actually a fairly straightforward method of doing this.  That method is set out in federal circular A-21 (wouldn't you know that the federal government had something to do with it!).  Institutions, like UAB, that receive federal grant money must justify the cost of each product or service that can be charged against those accounts.  The Lister Hill Library has just finished the semi-annual review of its service centers - Interlibrary Loan, MEDLINE, The Printing Center, Self-Service Photocopying and Photocopy Delivery.  There are some service centers that the Library subsidizes; i.e., pays part of the cost to operate the service center.  The Library does that to ease the burden for our cash customers, who are primarily students.   So, the Library subsidizes Interlibrary Loan, MEDLINE and Self-Service Photocopying.

For example, the Library charges our cash customers $10.00 plus tax and surcharge for each article or book we borrow for them.  The actual cost is almost $26.00 per article.  The Library's cost for our customers to photocopy a page is actually $0.12 per page.  However, the Library charges customers only $0.10 per page and subsidizes the rest.  With the Library's volume, that amounts to approximately $38,000 per year.  The only area that will increase its cost is Photocopy Delivery that goes from $1.77 to $3.50 per article.

The next review is in September when we will set prices for the following six-month period.