A decision support system for acquisitions budgeting in public libraries

Public libraries are computerizing their activities and producing mountains of managerially useful data. The present decision support system organizes these data and brings them to bear in producing materials acquisition budgets. Acquisition of new materials costs public libraries in the United States over $850 million per year. The Monroe County (Indiana) Public Library allocated its 1992 acquisitions budget using the DSS and found the system ‘flexible, workable, and above all, extremely valuable.’ The DSS has four modules: a database module that allows comparison across budget categories and inspection of trends in costs, circulation, acquisitions, stocks, turnover rates, and discards; a forecasting module that uses time series techniques to make cost and circulation forecasts; a budget-allocation module that produces a satisfactory allocation by iteratively solving a continuous knapsack problem; and a scenario-testing module that calculates future stock.