Doing more with less is a challenge facing all libraries. Staff sizes are trending down while technical services work load remains the same or is increasing, at the same time there are new and emerging areas of focus for libraries. Grand Valley State University Libraries have made a commitment to exploring any opportunity to outsource or streamline work flows. Presenters will discuss specific examples that utilize outsourcing opportunities as well as batch processing to keep up with the work demand and benefit the library. Positives and negatives of these experiences will be explored. Factors to be discussed will include: cost, staff time, quality of work, vendor, platform and access issues. The audience can expect to learn what factors to consider in exploring outsourcing opportunities and how to identify the appropriate ways to streamline work flows through batch processing. The experience of the presenters will hopefully help others as they weigh these considerations. GVSU dedicated staff to working with electronic resources starting in 2006. The experience gained in dealing with large amounts of records and data led us to use outsourcing and batch processing early and often. This experience led us to try outsourcing in other areas we had never considered before, we now employee this method in a variety of ways. We feel we have something to offer the library community from this experience.
