Financial and Cost Management for Libraries and Information Services 2nd edition

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (1998), "Financial and Cost Management for Libraries and Information Services 2nd edition", Library Review, Vol. 47 No. 8, pp. 410-412. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1998.47.8.410.9

Financial management in information and library services matters now more than ever before. Internal and external pressures on budgets demand increasingly streetwise and pragmatic solutions and techniques from managers. The emphasis on performance, and the market orientation (competitive tendering, service levela agreements, contracting out, income generation) in both public and private spheres of the library world, move everyone along fast in the direction of saying “what we can measure we can manage” and “we need to know both the cost and the value of everything in decision making”. For a world like this, in working information and library management, and in training students in library schools, there is a real need for practical guidance on the whats, hows, and whys of financial management, above all the hows.

One challenge has been to bring together a raft of theory and research on the one hand, with the practical techniques and approaches needed and used in working situations. Increasingly, too, these techniques are incorporating costing, pricing, and accounting assumptions and practices, and this makes the work of the manager harder still. Getting the practical balance between budgeting and costing which are really useful, and something which is merely theoretically or intellectually appealing, is not easy. This is why I have welcomed the appearance of works like Snyder and Davenport (Costing and Pricing in the Digital Age, Library Association, 1997), Schauer (The Economics of Managing Library Service, American Library Association, 1986), and G. Stevenson Smith (Accounting for Librarians and Other Not‐For‐Profit Managers, American Library Association, 1983). These are instances of works published in the last two decades which really succeed in interpreting financial techniques and applying them, with working examples, so that managers feel more confident about using them. For ILS folk, this makes them more effective, broadens out their skills, and equips them better to deal with financial professionals. Some of the best stuff going lies in courses (like The Larian Consultancy’s work on budgetary profiling).

Some of these characteristics can be found in Roberts’s Financial and Cost Management for Libraries and Information Services. This is the second edition of his original Cost Management for Library and Information Services published in 1985 (Bowker Saur has absorbed the original Butterworths list). In its day the first edition was strangely useful ‐ providing a wealth of information about concepts (such as cost analysis) and theoretical ideas and linkages (for example with management information systems and economics), but it was always hard to use for practitioners and for students. The second edition, “new material two‐thirds of the original”, stays on that theoretical plane, and indeed declares itself as concerned with “what libraries should do rather than what is done in practice”. The introduction picks up on the changes since the mid‐1980s, and the final section (the best) addresses the actual ways in which budgeting and costing have taken on board new approaches needed now (like full cost recovery). Some useful stuff here on total and marginal costing. It is also good to see that the original case study, based on material developed by the author at what is now Thames Valley University (where the author is Senior Lecturer in Information Science), has been extended to provide hard information about actual costings. Bibliographies have been updated ‐ this is more spasmodic than publicity claims ‐ so at times we really do feel we are in the world of Brophy and Earl, Morgan and Norton, Webber and White.

That said, the new edition presents its own frustrations. The wealth of theory is intimidating and the reader longs for a chance to break free of jargon and actually get to grips with the management of money. The structure of the book is confusing, coming round on topics again when the reader thinks they are done with (or, worse, provoking the reader into wondering why particular themes like budgets were not actually dealt with all in one place). Some key issues are mentioned but never developed (for example managerial economics is insubstantial, and issues associated with the effect of time on money, that is discounted cash flow and investment, is mentioned only in the glossary). Changes in this new edition are not as substantial as is claimed ‐ at least four of the original chapters remain very much the same. The work as a whole is more of a bibliographical and historiographical survey of the field since the late 1960s than a practical manual for the late 1990s, and, although some good stuff appeared in the distant past, by no means all of it is needed now, least of all for £45.00.

I personally would not be without Roberts’s discussion of costing (in chapter 5) and the very promising things (like unit costing) in chapter 8 (called applying principles to practice), because I know they are useful at work and for teaching. But what a curate’s egg of a book, and in some ways a historical curiosity.