Purchasing Bureaucracy
This week has been exciting and quite busy due to a windfall of one time end of the year monies the library received. I arrived back from vacation on Tuesday to be charged with getting quotes/invoices to make purchases by the end of the week. To make things even more interesting, the director was going away on vacation and most of the librarians were at the annual SUNYLA conference. Thank god I had done my research and got all the information more than a month ago. So I was super prepared and all I needed to do was contact the appropriate vendors. We ended up purchases several retrospective databases, and a collection of digital images as well as paying the setup fee for Docutek’s ERes.
The real credit for getting the job done on time goes to the director’s secretary who knows how to get things through the excruciating number of hoops that the College requires. The thing that was the most puzzling to me were the requirements concerning justifying why we were making the purchase through a particular vendor. Some lovely issues with the amount of money spend with a single vendor, auditors, quotes, contracts, and justifications for sole sourcing. I really don’t get it. I know I shouldn’t take it personally. Its just bureaucracy. However, it feels like the treasury guards are questioning my ability to do my job (part of which is collection development for e-resources).
After spending more time than I would have liked haggling, doing comparisions and running numbers in Excel before finalizing the e-resources list and budget for next year as well as helping put together justsification info, my general attitude was one of WHATEVER so long as the library gets the resources it wants. Now all I have to look forward to adding the new acquisition to our homegrown electronic resource management system, OpenURL resolver, and proxy server. Despite the hoops, the library is getting more e-resource sfor our money next year (including two new fulltext databases and several other subject specific databases). The best part is there really is something for everyone in the new acquisitions. I can’t wait to show off the new stuff!