Appendix 4: Survey Results (Challenges)

Responses to survey question: What obstacles or challenges do you face regarding standards at your library?

  • Some standards are extremely expensive and if the need for more standards increases, there will be financial considerations.
  • No real challenges. We are fortunate to be situated near and belonging to a consortium with a library with a very good standards collection.
  • A lack of money prevents the purchase of standards, especially in light of the frequency by which some of them change.  Also, there are minimal requests for the materials, but when requested, they can be difficult to obtain.
  • Cost is the major obstacle.  Identifying the standards is the easy part.
  • Space limitations.
  • Dealing with storing outdated standards. Finding the money to buy new standards since they are very expense. Dealing with the restrictive copyright of standards. We do like the ILI Standards database; it is very fast and you can download the PDF almost instantly after ordering. However, they only allow 1 copy made, so you can't make another copy for a patron. We catalog it and check it out to the patron. This sort of defeats the purpose of being able to download the PDF and email it to the user (which would be preferable).
  • cost and the sheer number of standards organizations, which bodies to collect, which not to you collect??? It is hard to peg demand.
  • money - we do not have the funding to purchase many standards
  • Figuring out which ones we do and do not have in our collection.  Alerting patrons to how to find these in our collection.  Most are not in the library catalog and that may be the only place patrons look for them.
  • students don't understand where they fit in the engineering information process. We're a research institution and standards tend to be used more in industry perhaps.  Other librarians don't understand how or why to use them.
  • Expense and interest
  • We've learned recently that our standing order for ANSI standards isn't providing what we thought.  Also, standards are extremely expensive and budgets are tight.
  • The expense of having a subscription and deciding which will be the most beneficial to our users
  • dollars; lack of internal flexibility in purchasing procedures & requirements. Mediated credit card purchase on demand at the sci/tech library would help.
  • I was concerned years ago that an on-demand ordering program might not be able to satisfy our standards needs. From all indications, however, it is very successful
  • We have a very small collection of ISO standards, which seem to be increasingly in demand. Our collection is very focused on American Standards.
  • Cost - standards are just too expensive. And, important as they are, they are a low priority when it comes to how to spend the budget.
  • Changing formats i.e., supporting varying electronic formats from CD to DVD.
  • money
  • Cost and lack of interest from faculty (as compared to say, their interest in academic journals)
  • we would like to figure out a way that the customer could order the standard themselves and leave us out of the mix, except for us paying the cost of obtaining the standard
  • Expense, maintaining a current collection
  • $$$$ is the biggest obstacle.  That and convincing our ILL unit that it is possible to obtain some of the standards from libraries, and that if that isn't possible to not stop there.
  • there are too many - am interested in more of a web-based access & delivery
  • Standards packages became cost prohibitive for the use they received.  Given our budget constraints, we chose to cancel most of our standards subscriptions in favor of materials more useful to our primary clientele.
  • Standards, because of the many challenges involved, are not catalogued in our collection.  Catalog entries would stimulate additional use.
  • They are hideously expensive to purchase, relative to use of individual standards.  We limit to packages (ASTM, IEEE) where we think the price/use ratio is affordable and where they support known/repeated course assignments.  ILL doesn't work well, because most libraries either don't own standards or don't indicate ownership (especially of individual numbers) on shared databases such as WorldCat. We only have a hint of what standards are available at which academic libraries when librarians have produced compilations.
  • Costs - some standards are very expensive for the use/coverage.
  • Mainly, of course, budgetary constraints
  • They are extremely expensive to purchase.  For example, keeping up just ASTM standards costs us about $6700 per year.  At the same time, most of the use appears to be users other than our faculty, staff, and students.  This makes justifying the cost of the collection hard to do.  For the last several years, we have pared the collection back and back. 
  • Large number of standards providers.  Difficult to keep up-to-date standards, easier to obtain current info when needed.
  • Extensive use of standards does not seem to be integral to the engineering curriculum at this university, therefore there is little incentive to purchase them for the library.  Standards are expensive and very specific, which makes it difficult to predict what standards will be needed. The choice seems to be either to purchase broad categories of standards in anticipation of possible use, or buy individual standards as requested to fill a specific need.
  • Our outside users are chagrinned that we don't buy ISO standards so that they don't have to buy them. This is actually not an obstacle as our users don't need ISOs.
  • Mostly the high cost of obtaining them or access to them.
  • money to throw at buying them.  Space is not an issue for us at this time, nor is organization or being able to locate what we have and what we don't.
  • Very few. Sometimes a patron will exceed the dollar limits for the standards, but this doesn't happen often. If it does, they can usually find a colleague to order for them.
  • One challenge might be maintaining an awareness of what standards are important to our users or will be important to our users.
  • the purchasing process is mediated and we would prefer an unmediated process whereby the requester could purchase what they wanted directly