Per capita budget figures

[Peter Jorgensen]

Can anyone provide some figures on what their budget for electronic 
media (and especially for Web-based resources, if it's broken out that 
way) is on a per capita basis?  I'm particularly interested in libraries 
more or less comparable to ours (public library serving a total 
population of about 230,000), but any figures would be helpful.

I've had to explain to sales reps for a number of online resources that 
the prices they quote me are as much as twice my *total* annual budget 
for *all* electronic media, and they always seem very surprised that we 
can't afford their products (they also seem surprised that we can't just 
move money from some other part of the budget, but that's another 
matter).  BTW, in some cases, the quoted prices already take into account 
a discount for being part of a state-wide consortium purchase.

TIA for any information you can provide.

Peter Jorgensen
Reference Department, Lincoln City Libraries
Lincoln, Nebraska
peterj at rand.lcl.lib.ne.us