OEM-UK costings – part 1

As promised in my previous post I am going to delve into the murky world of the timings and costs of cataloguing.

This is the first of two posts on the subject and in this post I will look at the cost of Drupal records v LMS traditional records.

 In the next post I will look at additional cost-savings the Drupal methodology delivers by being simpler than traditional LMS/MARC/AACR cataloguing.

 Staff costs

The OEM-UK Drupal cataloguing / data entry is done on a mid-range library assistant grade with a per hour rate of £10.80. The average IOE cataloguers hourly rate is £14.89, and the average hourly rate of pay for the subject experts, coders, Drupal experts, and metadata experts is £22.08.

We make an immediate staff cost-saving using Drupal by pulling the data entry away from AACR2/MARC21/Indexing as it enables us to do this very time-consuming work at a lower grade (£10.80 as opposed to £14.89).

 The cost of ‘normal’ IOE/LMS cataloguing

The average time to catalogue and index a school textbook at the IOE using our LMS/AACR2/MARC21 is 20 minutes (10 minutes of which is for the in-house indexing) a cost of £4.96 (£2.48 of which is for the indexing).

The cost of cataloguing OEM-UK textbooks

There are two sets of timings and costs for OEM-UK/Drupal records due to the different approaches we took to subject indexing.

The average time to Drupal catalogue history textbooks, which required subject carding by subject experts, was 4 minutes 10 seconds and cost £1.19 (70.5 p. for cataloguing and 48.5 p. for the indexing).

The average time to Drupal catalogue science & technology textbooks, which required a script to be written to match subjects with our controlled vocabulary, was 3 minutes 55 second and cost 76.5 p. (70.5 p. for the cataloguing and 6 p. per book for the script).

The cost of enhancing OEM-UK indexing

The easily configurable nature of Drupal enables a process of index-enhancement post record creation using additional indexing that we have obtained from researchers (I’ll post on the indexing later).

It took on average 1 minute to add this indexing to the records in Drupal at a cost of 18 p. per record. The cost of creating the new subject in the Drupal form is negligible (to prove this I worked it out as being 0.00007 p. per book!)

Summary of the cost of records (Drupal v LMS)

                                  OEM-UK/Drupal         IOE/LMS        

Cataloguing                 70.5 p.                            £2.48

Indexing                                                                 £2.48

Card-indexing             48.5 p.

Script-indexing            6 p.

Enhanced-indexing     +18 p.

Summary of costs per record

OEM-UK cataloguing is 3.5 times cheaper than traditional cataloguing at the IOE.

The cost of indexing using scripts is by far the cheapest way to index (hardly surprising), it is over 40 times cheaper than normal indexing done by IOE professional indexers. This method relies upon having existing controlled vocabularies and in-house coding skills (see this post on the role of professional cataloguers in OEM-UK) but it is further evidence that there are opportunities in the new post-MARC environment for professional cataloguers to use their skills strategically to increase productivity and enhance semantics.

Using (expensive) subject experts to card books prior to Drupal cataloguing is a lot more expensive than using scripts but it still works out 5 times cheaper than normal indexing.

Our ability to iteratively enhance subject indexing as researchers identify books on specific topics increases costs; but this enhanced indexing is still relatively cheap at a cost of an additional 18 p. per record.

The cost of cataloguing OEM-UK exam papers

There is no direct IOE equivalent with which to compare the cataloguing of the exam papers – we have never been able to afford it before and we thought outside of the normal cataloguing box to enable this work to be done (see this post for more details on this).

But each exam takes 1 minute to catalogue and costs 24 p. in total (18 p. for the cataloguing and 6 p. for the indexing).

To sum up

The OEM-UK methodology is clearly quicker and cheaper than existing LMS/AACR/MARC practice. But how does OEM-UK indexing and cataloguing compare to normal indexing and cataloguing?

This will be the subject of another post soon  …