Serials in the Dartmouth College Library are paid for out of over 50 subject-oriented funds. The money comes from Dartmouth College and the Tuck, Thayer, and Medical Schools. Some of the practices described below apply to Arts & Sciences (College) funds only, as specified.

Bibliographers with assigned subject areas are responsible for expending the funds in the course of each fiscal year. Each bibliographer is assigned one or more funds, including both monograph and serial money for a given subject area. The  Associate Librarian for Information Resources is responsible for distributing, monitoring and balancing the materials budget, and consults regularly with individual bibliographers. The Acquisitions Librarian assists with planning and reporting on monographic and serial funds, respectively.

Arts & Sciences serials funds are budgeted at the previous year's level of expenditure, adjusted to account for money encumbered for titles on order. Inflation funds are kept in a separate account. (Tuck/Thayer/Medical serials funds are determined by the appropriate librarians working with their deans.)

Arts & Sciences serials funds are used for ongoing titles only, to the extent practicable. Items not part of ongoing subscriptions (e.g. backfiles, indexes, replacements) are purchased from other funds (see #5 below). (Tuck/Thayer/Medical funds may be used for everything relating to serials.)

All bibliographers receive regular Millennium reports from Acquisitions Services, including the current status of their serials fund(s). The free balance of a given fund is the net sum of the allocation minus encumbrance and expenditures.

As of FY 92, encumbrances for serials apply only to new (or partially paid) serials. (In the two previous fiscal years, serials funds were fully encumbered for renewals.) The encumbrance is automatically raised when a new order with an estimated price is input, and automatically reduced when a bill is paid for that order. When multiple years/volumes are expected (and encumbered), but only some are received, the balance stays encumbered until payment is made, as long as the operator changes the order status to partially received.

Estimated prices are generally not used for monographic series or other irregular publications because of the lack of accuracy in estimating, unless they are known to be regular in frequency. Therefore new monographic series and other infrequent / irregular titles are not accounted for in the serials budget reports until they are actually paid for. Obscure serial publications for which no price information is available will also lack an estimated price.

Acquisitions staff attempt to estimate how much will be spent in the first fiscal year in which the material is billed, taking into account delayed publication if known. For journals and annuals, payment is normally made in the fall for the following calendar year. Therefore any subscription orders placed after May 15 for the current calendar year will normally be encumbered for two years (current and following).

Acquisitions informs bibliographers about price increases of more than 20% and over $50, or supplies budget reports for major vendors. Queries from agents regarding large price increases are passed on to bibliographers for decision-making.

Reports will be supplied quarterly to each bibliographer regarding money released through cancellations and cessations. These are cumulative for each fiscal year, and the criteria for titles appearing on the lists are as follows:

1. Only titles for which payments were made since the beginning of the previous fiscal year will appear on the budget report. (For complete list of cancellations, see monthly cancellation lists; for complete list of cessations, see the monthly Bibliographic Control Action Report.)
2. The amount released will be the amount paid for the title in the previous fiscal year, less credits for cancellations only. If there are payments in the current year, full credit will not be given until the following July.
3. In rare cases, last year's payment is a negative amount because credits were posted. In this case no money can be released because the title no longer is accounted for in the budget.

Serial funds should be assigned to specific titles only by the bibliographer authorized to use that fund (unless the bibliographer indicates otherwise). Serial funds should be used only for their assigned home library unless both the bibliographer at the location and for the fund agree to the exception.

A change in fund assignment for a serial should be agreed upon by the bibliographers for both the old and new funds. In addition, if any payments were made in the previous or current fiscal year, it should be made explicit whether the bibliographers want to have funds transferred from the old to the new fund. If the change in fund assignment is also a transfer, it should be processed as such (including the counting of any volumes withdrawn by the location giving up the title).

For expensive interdisciplinary titles or memberships, a permanent sharing arrangement is possible. Order records for each fund will be attached to the title, and the bill will be split according to the agreement between the bibliographers involved.

For Arts & Sciences funds, backfiles are generally being funded from a selector's monographic funds. (In this case a separate order record is created in Millennium.) Three small funds exist for inexpensive back issues (new and replacements), or volumes associated with serials (such as a cumulative index), to be used at Acquisitions' discretion.