The University of California Libraries: A Plan for Development (1977)

138 The University of California Libraries
information services. Other activities, such as the development of
automated systems, analysis of operations, research, and management may
be viewed as supporting both general areas, and for budgetary purposes
are usually distributed proportionally into the two broad categories
described.
In the past, budgetary requests for staff in the acquisitionsprocessing
category have been associated with increased acquisition
rates, and requests for staff in the reference-circulation category have
been associated with increases in the user population (either enrollment
or total users). For several reasons, however, this method is
inadequate for projecting library staffing needs in the future. In the
first place, there is statistical evidence that the number of staff
required varies not only with these two factors but also with the total
size of the library collection. Statistics for the eighty-eight academic
members of the Association of Research Libraries, for example, indicate
that the size of the staff does indeed increase with the size of enrollments
and annual acquisitions, but at a slower rate. The ratio of volumes
held to full-time-equivalent personnel, for example, varies from about
4,000 to one at institutions with less tan a million volumes to about
10,000 to one at large institutions such as Harvard and Yale. Apparently
as an academic library grows in size, proportionally fewer staff are
required. The relationship is approximately linear, and hence can be
used to project the size of staff required by the University of California
libraries as they grow in size of collections. Estimates of the staff
required on this basis are shown in Tables 17 and 18, projected to the
fiscal year 1987/88.
The projections point up two serious problems. In the first place,
the number of existing personnel is already insufficient. Hundreds of
thousands of volumes of library materials are backlogged in UC libraries
awaiting processing for lack of sufficient cataloging staff, and each of
the nine campus libraries has had increasing difficulties in meeting the
service demands of its users. Yet the projections provide no assurance
that these backlogs and service deficiencies could be overcome. On the
other hand, following even these conservative projections, the University
libraries would require almost half again as many personnel by 1987/88