Budgeting: Academic Library staff and Academics Project cost? In-kind?

[Ruth McConchie]

Hi all,

Leena and I have looked at the example (where they cost certain time of librarians) and we weren’t sure how to cost the library staff’s time and time of the academics collaborating on the project. Obviously there are certain projects that would be covered by the librarians/ academic salary, so should we cost it as project cost or in-kind support from the library/ faculty?

Thanks,

Ruth

 

[Kate Davis]

Hi Ruth

It’s difficult to say with out knowing more about your project and what the staff would be doing.

Typically you would cost staffing that is in place specifically for the project – e.g. a project officer or manager, but you may not include time for staff in the branch library to run a program.

Can you please provide some more context about your project including what you anticipate staff will be doing, and who those staff are? (i.e. regular staffing or additional.)

K

[Ruth McConchie]

Hi Kate,

Sorry I wasn’t very specific. We are proposing a digital/ information literacy program for visual arts students. The Project manager and CI librarians would be doing a fair bit of development with faculty, contacting mentors and preparing the program before the semester started. Then when the semester started the CI librarians would be helping to run workshops/ events and assisting/ contributing in the online forum. These programs may not always occur in the physical library. So we were thinking of costing out the project manager’s and librarian’s time in the project development, but not in the program implementation.

The academics involved would be doing extra development work during the semester break too, so we were thought their time in project development should be paid for, but not during the semester. Does this sounds reasonable/ realistic?

Thanks Kate!

Thanks,

Ruth

 

[Kate Davis]

You’ve done some good thinking through on this. It’s tricky stuff.

I think in the real world there would be a number of variables that would impact on exactly what is considered a cost. These are variables that are hard to pin down in a hypothetical. So let me give you an example.

I’m currently leading a faculty funded teaching and learning research project. My time is included in the budget for the project, but it is considered to be ‘in workload’, so we don’t get extra money to pay for it. It’s simply 20% of my time. The same is true for the other two academics on the project, who are each contributing 10% of their time. The staffing cost that actually costs us real cash is hiring research assistants to do the data collection and other pieces of work like transcribing interview recordings. So in the budget, we had two cost columns: one for in kind contribution (the $ amount that the % of our time costs) and one for the cash we were asking for to cover all the non in kind costs (primarily hiring research assistants). In your case, if you wanted to follow this kind of model, you could note % in kind contributions in the budget rationale/explanation free text field under the table, and just include the actual cold hard cash you’re asking for in the table itself (ie from what you’re saying, I think the only staffing that wouldn’t be covered by current staff would be the project manager, so that’s what I would expect to see in the table).

But having said all that… It is complex with a hypothetical so as long as you clearly explain what money you are asking for and what it will cover, we’ll be happy with that.

And I’m sorry for the slow reply. No matter how many times I whitelist the email address for the forum notifications, they end up in my spam. Gah! Feel free to ping me on Twitter if I don’t reply quickly.

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