Fee for External Users of the Herbarium

[Diana G. Horton]

My Chair is pressing the issue of charging external users (i.e. other
institutions that request loans) a fee.  He suggests a "standary
handling fee" of $10 + cost of postage.  His rationale for this is that
other "centralized, specialized [departmental] facilities" charge a fee
for their services, and we should too.  These other facilities include
the phosphorimager, imaging facility, electronics/repair shop and the
transmission electron microscopy facility.

The best argument that I can come up with is that the Herbarium is *not*
comparable to these other facilities because none of these other facilities
have a counterpart at other institutions that is utilized by our faculty
at no cost.  I will have to stress the reciprocal nature of herbarium loans.
However, the difficulty is that there are only three of us who use loans of
herbarium specimens in our research, and one of these will be retiring (and
most likely will not be replaced in kind) this year.  The one other thing I
can think of is to tell him that we will have to pay the cost of returning
all of the loans that we currently have out (for our research), *plus* pay
each of those institutions a 'standard handling fee', if we are going to
institute a fee for borrowers of our collections.  I also suspect that he
will come back and say that each of us will have to generate sufficient
grant funds to cover the cost of borrowing specimens.

Can anyone offer any suggestions?  Is there a stronger way to counter this
attack?

Thanks!

-- Diana Horton

Herbarium 312 CB
Biological Sciences
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA  52242