A Minimum Budget for Current Acquisitions

FOR MANY YEARS library administrators and acquisitions librarians have been concerned about arriving at basic cost figures for book budgets. In preparing the budget the fiscal manager can find all kinds of advice about preparing the budget early, comparing his library with similar institutions (which are probably as inadequate as his own), considering the educational goals of the institution, etc. The administrator can find little guidance, however, on actual costs in the area of acquisitions. The 1959 ACRL "Standards for College Libraries'' skirt the central issues of collection size and book budget. The "standard" of 50,000 volumes for up to 600 students and 10,000 additional volumes for every additional 200 students is admittedly ''based upon observation of the development of college libraries."1 Rather than actually setting standards, this document describes the less primitive existing practices and sanctions them with a "this-is-about-the-best-we-