as monies allocated for their specialized collection, or in cash premiums, for this "insurance".


B. Costs

1. Organizational and monitoring costs: We need to measure the costs of maintaining
cooperation between the libraries. This does not include borrowing or lending costs. Such costs
would be the development of information resources regarding the collection holdings for each
member library, membership fees, travel costs, costs of meetings to plan acquisition
strategies,etc.
2. Lending and borrowing costs: Delivery fees, cost of labor involved in processing the material,
etc. Specialization will raise the volume of trade between libraries, so this will be significantly
higher.
3. The costs associated with extra efforts required to obtain specialized materials in the
designated collection area. As more items are acquired at greater depth, the acquisition costs will
be expected to rise. Whether this is greater than or less than the offsetting reduction in non-
acquired materials, while taking into consideration the benefits of specialization in reducing unit
labor costs remains to be seen.
4. Time costs: Some estimate of how long the user has to wait for delivery of the material to
their local library. This should be weighted by some measure of demand for the item, if possible.

C. Data

It is not cost effective to get data regarding every single item in the Latin American collection.
One possibility is to draw a random sample of titles from the collection, then try to get usage data
(both within library and across libraries) for the sample. Information on imports and exports of
Latin American materials needs to be collected. Examination of the material traded may allow
for a measure of trade composition to be constructed. With the above information, we may be
able to predict what material would or would not be acquired if cooperation was not possible.
This would measure the duplication of resources cost and could help quantify the cost of non-
acquisition that a library user might incur in order to find materials not located at a local library.

VI. Product and Timeline

A conservative estimate of what could be produced by this study is a cost-benefit analysis of
cooperative collection development in Latin American publications, and recommendations of
some organizational mechanisms that will facilitate cooperation by consortium members. A
general methodology of the acquisition decision using the University of Florida's Latin American
collection should be developed, and that technique could be applied to other libraries in another
study.

The time period for the above project is one year, at six month full-time equivalent (FTE),
beginning in 1997. Approximately $5,000 would be budgeted toward data collection by a
research assistant. My preliminary timeline is as follows: