Sometimes my job is all about the small things. For example, I am sometimes asked how much we spend annually in access fees for e-content. Access fees (or “hosting fees”) are charged by a vendor once you have purchased e-content but want to continue viewing the content on a third-party platform rather than hosting it yourself. You’re asking yourself, “Who would want to host a bunch of disparate content on their own? Of COURSE we would want the vendor to keep all those e-books/e-journals/databases on the existing platform.” I know, it’s nutty. It’s also expensive. Sometimes we pay thousands of dollars to access content we’ve already bought. The library world is a strange place.
So, how much do we spend on all this stuff annually? I’ll tell you next year. We just created a fund code for Access Fees and I’m in the process of creating new order records that are tied to this fund. At the end of the year I’ll be able to run a report that shows how much money we spent in that fund. Hooray!
