BL have an  grey literature section - SIGLE  may be worth contacting

If everything went up in smoke, what would it cost to replace?

 If  books,  rough estimate would be £300  - £400 per 2'6" shelf. 

Do you hold any specialist collections

Do you hold other media or plastic books may have a high purchase cost

 electronic replacement for journals.

Grey literature is difficult to put a price on - much depends on how much it's used - if there was a fire, how much - and what - would be missed? Could it be obtained again from organisations/companies?  If yes, then a) compiling a list would cost time, as would contacting all the organisations.  A minimum of £10 per hour for someone to do all that, I'd have thought. And even if the list of grey lit. can be (easily) pulled off your catalogue, that would still incur time & effort.

How much of this is available in electronic format? There, you'd have the cost/time of downloading. With both you'd have the cost of re-cataloguing it.

. Take what you spent on books for the last financial year, divide that by the number of items received, obtaining an average price per volume. Then multiply this by the number of volumes held in the library. This would be an approximate cost for replacing all your stock.

 If you know the number of volumes you've got in the collection, you 

could do a rough estimate using 

"average" price of a book x no. of books. if you're needing replacement cost rather than original price, I'd suggest £30 as "average" - most paperbacks clinical 

books are £20 - £25 these days, and that adds a bit extra for the 

smaller number of very expensive texts. Grey literature may have come 

free but not be obtainable any more, which makes it priceless. 

National Library Guidelines eg Higher education etc   ( I have not looked into this)

regards

Diane Geldard,Library Manager
PCTs Library, Oldham PCT
Ellen House,Waddington Street
Oldham OL9 6EE
Tel 0161 622 6551
Fax 0161 622 6559
email [log in to unmask]