The True Cost of Acquisitions

An Archivist’s Toolbox

Words & Illustrations by Mary Kidd

Archivists can employ tools, such as spreadsheets or databases, that can automatically calculate, project and measure labor costs and capacity.

Earlier this year, I read an article titled "Hail the Maintainers." The authors, writing on the rise of Silicon Valley, argue that too much value is given to innovation, rather than the labor involved in maintaining the technologies resulting from it. “Maintenance and repair, the building of infrastructures, the mundane labour that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructures, simply has more impact on people’s daily lives than the vast majority of technological innovations,” the authors assert.

That is worth a deeper dive. I drew parallels between this sort of technological maintenance labor that the authors described, and the day-to-day tasks performed by library and archives workers, especially within and in support of special or research collections. Coincidentally, I read this article while involved in two projects where I developed calculator tools that can measure the impact of a single acquisition in terms of staff capacity and associated supplies, transportation and labor costs. These calculators give evidence to the lasting impact acquisitions, both large and small, can have over an entire department. In addition, they offer a way forward for institutions to take informed steps towards more sustainable collection development.

The Maintainers made me think about whether there were words or concepts commonly used within special collections like “innovation” that similarly obscure the lived realities of workers’ experiences. The word I honed in on was “donation”; as in, “an acquisition that was donated to the archive”. This word connotes something as free-of-charge to the recipient, which in the case of acquisition donations could not be farther from the truth.

Anyone involved knows first-hand that acquiring donations requires work across several areas, including performing site assessments, packing, picking up and delivering, processing, arranging, rehousing, treating, and digitization. This work is both necessary upfront (at the point at which these items come through the door) as well as over the long term: what some refer to as collection management or stewardship.  Add to that the cost of supplies, licensing fees for the database systems used to track and describe all of what we collect, and physical and digital storage costs. Yet, despite their obvious operational impacts, there is still a common misconception that, because of the lack of an upfront purchase price, donations come with less of an expense.

One of the calculators I helped to develop was for the OCLC Research Library Partnership’s Collection Building and Operational Impact Working Group. It was included in a suite of acquisition measuring impact tools, as well as featured in a report that characterizes cost-agnostic decision-making as leading to institutions “[c]ollecting beyond [their] capacity”, resulting in the build-up of “uncatalogued and unprocessed material… hamper[ing] [their] ability to “meet our obligations to creators, donors, and researchers''. With the focus being more about getting as much through the door as possible, resource-strapped processing departments are faced with ever-growing backlogs, exacerbated by the recent operational impacts inflicted by COVID-19 related lockdowns.

Although archives have come up with more efficient processing protocols to make dents in backlogs such as the More Product, Less Process ideology, these approaches tend to place the burden of backlogs on archives workers. Collection decision makers might use the outputs of these sorts of calculators to inform the pace at which we collect, rather than on the pace at which workers can work more “efficiently”.

The Tools

There are now wide-scale efforts throughout the field of archives to create tools that communicate and demonstrate the downstream impact of acquisitions. One example of these efforts is the OCLC’s Collection Building and Operational Impact (CBOI) Working Group, led by Senior Program Officer Chela Scott Weber, who brought together several professionals working in special collections environments, and tasked them with creating a comprehensive suite of open-source tools and resources designed to measure these impacts.

In my work for the CBOI, I chaired a subgroup that was tasked to develop a spreadsheet tool called the Operational Impact Estimator, or OIE. This tool can be downloaded for use by anyone (a helpful tutorial video, produced by OCLC which shows the OIE in action, can be viewed here). The spreadsheet tool works by having a user first fill out staff pay rate, which generates a base labor cost per hour calculation. 

The Operational Impact Estimator (OIE) takes a worker’s annual salary, multiplies it by the benefit rate, and divides the subtotal by the number of workdays in a year to determine the base hourly labor rate.

The OEI also determines a worker’s annual capacity by first determining whether they are full or part-time, and how much of their time, expressed as a percentage, they spend on average working on collections. Their full-time and collections percentage are multiplied against total annual working days, resulting in total annual capacity days.

The user then continues to fill out fields that measure each defined staff type’s capacity rates, and budgets, and later, scope out the project by entering in the amount of estimated hours taken by each defined staff type across several activity categories (accessioning, processing, treatments, etc.) to determine the gross length of the project. Lastly, the OIE outputs a total staff capacity, showing what percentage of a staff’s time will be taken to complete a project.

The OIE, in concert with the communication templates and the annotated bibliography offered within the greater “Total Cost of Operations” Tools Suite, provides a portfolio of reports that can be communicated across or up the administrative chain, to build awareness of the labor impacts related to acquisitions, and start conversations over balancing collecting priorities, sustainable workloads, and available resources.

Outside of my work on the CBOI, I am employed full-time as a Systems and Operations Coordinator at the New York Public Library, and do front- and back-end development on a database known as SPEC (the name “SPEC” being a riff on “special collections”). SPEC contains a module called SPEC Acquisitions that manages the entire acquisitions process, and includes an impact calculator that operates in a similar fashion to the OIE. Here, curators input acquisition details into a web proposal form, and include basic details such as a title, means, and tax form details. In addition to basic details, curators also use this form to build up item-level inventories.

Portrait of a storage space somewhere in New York. The SPEC database attempts to measure the labor and capacity impact of special collections, before they get through the doors of NYPL.

Once the proposal is submitted, this inventory is used to create an “extent summary”, which groups the item-level inventory line items into four main categories, and produces a subtotal count for each:

• Items (i.e. unboxed, one-off items such as a single volume, a pamphlet, a map)
• Linear feet (namely, paper archives contained in boxes)
• Audio and moving image (AMI) items
• Digital media (computers, hard drives, floppy disks)
• Gigabytes

SPEC uses the extent summary to calculate the amount of time, in days, it will take to assess, accession, process/arrange, catalog and post-process, migrate, and/or ingest the acquisition. Once these projections are created, SPEC sends a notification message to the managers of Cataloging and Archival Processing, so they can review and if necessary, amend or tabulate additional costs. For example, if items are being shipped using a fine arts vendor, or will be shipped to a vendor for digitization, those costs can be added at this stage. SPEC Acquisitions is essentially the relational database version of the entire TCS Tools Suite, in that it both calculates and communicates on behalf of preservation staff and those involved in the various stages of acquisitions, including curatorial, budget, and administrative staff.

SPEC’s success relies on the fact that it is built using a relational database, which means it can dynamically interact with data from other parts of the SPEC database universe. One example of this is how the SPEC Acquisitions calculator can be used to automate staff assignments and scheduling. This is because in another module, SPEC Projects, we document records for each staff’s assigned projects. Here, department managers input start and end dates for distinct projects being done by each of their staff (i.e. “Lou Reed Papers processing project”). From the SPEC Acquisitions Calculator, managers can check against any one staffer’s existing project schedule, and easily determine how best to assign and schedule the various work across the whole staff.

Adjacent to every acquisition is a worker, or a team of workers, devoting their time to its stewardship. This portrait of a processing archivist represents one of the many tasks required of workers involved in collection stewardship and maintenance.

In understanding how many days it may take to process a collection, and feeding this data into our existing scheduling queue, we can show not only how much we are doing at the moment, but we can also visually express the extent of our backlogs. Further, we can use this queue to inform curatorial staff, who in turn may use this information to make critical processing prioritization decisions. In future SPEC developments, since we are recording and summarizing extents, we may also be able to use SPEC to better manage temporary storage spaces.

Although the OIE and SPEC Acquisitions are incredibly useful, these tools should not be seen as stand-ins for critical, thoughtful, and nuanced conversations with our colleagues involved in collection-building activities. The hope here is that decisions will not be finalized simply by throwing money at the situation, or hiring temporary or contingent workers to lessen backlog burdens. However, in my work in both cases, the intention is that my colleagues use these tools to confidently make the case for long-lasting resources, as well as influence and foster the type of labor visibility that leads to more responsible approaches towards donations, and other sorts of acquisitions.