Using Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing to Support Performance Measurement in Estonian University Libraries: A Case Study for Acquisition Process

Libraries today are included in the general demand for cost transparency and effective cost management. In the current socio-economic situation, it is challenging to cope with the same or reduced resources in managing the same processes and activities, so that the quality of the result would not be affected. The need of library managers to justify their costs to their parent organizations has become particularly important, perhaps even more important than ever in the history. With the data they have traditionally collected, libraries can assess details about the costs of collection building; what they need now are reliable data about the costs of their services and products. However, libraries lack a specific overview of the activities between which their costs are divided. Cost accounting is the simple process of breaking down resources to the activity being carried on and then collating the monetary cost to show the cost of the activity. The time-driven activity-based costing TDABC helps to get a better picture of the acquisition related activities that libraries are actually engaged in and their costs. The purpose of the present paper is to analyse the cost of activities related to acquisition process in Estonian university libraries based on the example of the time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) method. More specifically, the study concerned both the acquisition process of foreign as well as domestic documents in physical carriers – books, audiovisual documents and printed music documents. Only documents acquired as purchases were added. While analysing the results, it appeared that the difference in time consumed for purchasing a document can be remarkable and it concerns, first and foremost, acquiring foreign documents.