Currency trends and collection building: Implications for acquisitions

Sheila Smyth Currency trends and collection building Implications for acquisitions A headline in the New York Times reads “Good for Europe’s exports, not so good for Europe.” The article dealt with the decline of the euro against the dollar since early December 2009, and academic librarians purchasing extensively in Europe might have added “Great for U.S. libraries!” The dollar cost of books originating in the euro-zone, that is, in any one of the sixteen European Union countries that have adopted the euro as their common currency, had dropped 10 percent in that period. In 1995, James Mouw stated: “The age in which any librarian purchasing more than a limited number of titles can ignore interna- tional finance is long past.” 1 And yet, apart from well-known issues associated with the purchasing of serials, there is little evidence of attention to this important factor. This paper argues for the creation of insti- tutional programs incorporating mechanisms for greater responsiveness to currency trends into the building of collections. At the 2009 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, conversations with fellow bibli- ographers in the humanities revealed that some felt very pleased with their acumen in taking advantage of what was to the lay- man the unexplainable rise of the dollar in fall 2008. In the expectation that the dollar would sink again in 2009 (as it did), they concentrated their efforts in late fall 2008 on requesting materials from European publish- ers, deliberately postponing U.S. purchases. They were convinced that this strategy had allowed them to add considerably more European items to their collections November 2010 than would have been the case had they followed their usual ordering patterns. Intrigued by this concept, I decided to examine more rigorously whether this was a freak consequence of the global financial meltdown of 2008, or whether librarians in- volved with collection development should emulate international business practice in exploiting currency fluctuations. There was no opportunity to do this before the 1970s, which marked the end of the era of more or less static rates of exchange. We recall how circa 2000 the cost to U.S. libraries of serials published in Europe rose substan- tially due to pricing decisions intended to counteract the effect of such currency fluctuations, but generally benefitting the publishers. 2 Is it high time for U.S. libraries to take advantage of currency fluctuations? The argument presented here applies more especially to individually selected items, which are priced according to the rate of exchange at the time of purchase and for which the librarian controls the timing of purchase. This paper highlights the euro, but a similar analysis for the British pound or any other foreign currency would no doubt yield similar results. Think of the repercus- sions of the expected upward revaluation of the Chinese RMB. The current favorable conditions for collection development in Chinese Studies may soon be at an end. Fluctuations in the euro-dollar exchange Sheila Smyth is research librarian at the University of California-Irvine, e-mail: smyths@uci.edu © 2010 Sheila Smyth C&RL News