Pharmaceutical Library Services: Financial & Staffing Resources

With shrinking resources and increasing pressure for services, corporate libraries and information centers are struggling to balance their budget and staffing levels while providing services that demonstrate their value to their organization. To deal with these challenges, library leaders need to effectively balance their budgets and resources with service volumes that have the greatest impact for their internal customers.

Best Practices, LLC conducted this research to help library and information center leaders compare their budget and staffing with those at other organizations within the biopharmaceutical industry.

KEY TOPICS

• Financial resources
• Cost recovery practices
• Distribution of FTE hours by service category
• Penetration of potential user base

SAMPLE KEY METRICS

• Number of potential and actual users of library services
• Total cost of providing library services
• Cost per potential and actual user
• What method, if any, does library use to recover costs for its services
• Percentage of FTE hours dedicated to various support services
  

• Cost Recovery: The most common cost-recovery method in use by participants is charging heavy user groups for the cost of expensive, specialized, niche resources. In the Device Segment, none of the participating companies recover costs, while 43% of Pharma Segment companies do.

Twenty-one companies participated in this study, with 16 representing the pharmaceutical/ biotech industries and five representing the medical device/ diagnostic industries.

If you purchase Best Practice Database document(s), you will have 30 days from the date of purchase to apply some or all of the cost of the document(s) toward the cost of a Full Access Individual, Pharma, Group or University Membership. Write us at DatabaseTeam@bestpracticesllc.com or call David Guinn at 919-767-9179 if you have any questions.