At many university libraries, the toxic economy has eaten away at staffing levels and at collections-and-acquisitions budgets. It has deflated endowments and disrupted plans to build new facilities and upgrade equipment.
But in response, librarians are doing more than tightening their belts. Some see the crisis as a chance to change the way they do business. It has spurred efforts to dream up ambitious solutions to big problems, such as collaborative storage networks that let libraries share the costs of housing valuable but burdensome print collections. The money pinch has also heightened the appeal of open-access content.
The worst of times, some say, may help make the path to better times clearer. “We joke here, and we’ve heard it at other places, ‘Don’t let a good crisis go to waste,’” says Lori A. Goetsch, dean of libraries at Kansas State University and president of the Association of College and Research Libraries. “It has maybe moved things forward at a pace that we might not have been able to otherwise.”
To find out just how hard library budgets have been hit, the Association of Research Libraries, which represents 124 institutions in North America, began a survey of its members in October. Complete results will probably not be available for a couple of months, according to Charles B. Lowry, the association’s executive director. From the reports he has heard so far, though, the pain is widespread. “Acquisitions budgets are taking a big hit this year, too, along with staff and operations,” Mr. Lowry said.
Few of the association’s members hold out much hope that the outlook will improve anytime soon. “There’s already an expectation expressed that there will be more cuts during the current fiscal year, and a high expectation that they’ll continue into 2010-11. That’s scary,” says Mr. Lowry. “Maybe things will turn around, but right now the outlook is extremely pessimistic.”
Ms. Goetsch certainly feels the budget pain at Kansas State. A hiring freeze, in place for two years, has left 20 positions in the library vacant. Some of those jobs “are very strategic,” she says. “It’s not sustainable for the long term.”
She does not yet know how much her library’s budget will be cut this year. Many libraries, especially at public institutions like hers, have been waiting for that news as state legislatures wrangle over ever-shrinking pools of money. Ms. Goetsch has already cut her print-monograph budget by about 50 percent this year to try to preserve money for journal and database subscriptions. She hopes to be able to use some endowment money to offset that cut a bit, but the first priority is protecting what she calls “services to the library community,” which include interlibrary loans and helping students learn to use library resources.
Mary Ellen K. Davis, executive director of Ms. Goetsch’s association, says that many smaller libraries have made protecting services to students their No. 1 goal in lean times, while larger libraries make their collections their priority. But she emphasizes that there is no one-size-fits-all way to sum up libraries’ situations. She has heard of cuts that range anywhere from 2 or 5 percent to 10 percent or more.
No Gold in California
The slice was 18 percent, or more than $4-million, last year at the University of California at Berkeley, says Thomas C. Leonard, the university librarian. In California, higher education has received a succession of body blows as the state’s finances collapse, and Mr. Leonard has had to roll with some very hard punches.
“I can tell really sad stories about our budget,” Mr. Leonard says. “We’re really, really hurting.” His library has lost 30 full-time employees in recent months. The money Mr. Leonard has to employ student workers has been cut by 25 percent, and the budget for library work stations has been halved. On the plus side of the ledger, the library’s acquisitions budget has been protected by order of the chancellor, according to Mr. Leonard.
Mr. Leonard is not a pessimist. He points out that numbers alone do not tell the whole story at institutions like his. Libraries have made significant and, in some cases, relatively cheap progress in digitizing their collections. “So we’re realizing tens of millions of dollars in benefits, but it’s not reflected in budget figures,” he observes.
To get a sense of how Berkeley’s library makes do with less, The Chronicle spoke with Chuck Eckman, associate university librarian and director of collections. He describes a three-pronged strategy, the first part of which is to look for sources of revenue other than state money. (The library has its own development office, and raised more than $10-million last year, according to Mr. Leonard.) Berkeley’s library now covers 15 to 18 percent of its collection-development expenditures with money from private sources, Mr. Eckman says. “We’re hoping to up that over time.”
Second is to beef up longstanding partnerships with other libraries in the University of California system and with nearby Stanford University. For instance, Berkeley is expanding the Direct Borrow Program, through which faculty members and students can get material from partner libraries within 24 hours, into subject areas it has not included before. “We’re kind of dividing up the world,” Mr. Eckman says of the partner libraries. “The goal here is to ensure that as budgets decline, we don’t cancel the same thing.”
Third is to figure out which scholarly journals and other materials are truly must-keep items. Over two years, the Berkeley library will cut its books-and-journals budget by 14 percent. Deciding what to ax is the job of 50 “selectors,” subject-area librarians familiar with the journals and monographs used by researchers in those areas. The selectors talk directly with departments to find out what they can do without, Mr. Eckman says. “They’re best positioned to make the trade-off. We give them flexibility to do that.”
Subject librarians on individual campuses such as Berkeley’s do not bear these burdens alone. Ivy Anderson is director of collection development at the California Digital Library, part of the California system’s office of the president. Among other responsibilities, Ms. Anderson’s office negotiates systemwide library licenses with publishers for access to journal databases and other big-ticket items. It provides what she calls “evidence-based” analysis to help libraries throughout the system decide what’s still worth paying for and how much it ought to cost.
With journals, for instance, the analysis takes into account how much use they get, how much they cost relative to other publishers’ offerings, and their impact factors, a measure of how often articles from a particular journal are cited in a given period of time. That information goes to librarians throughout the system, who use it to make decisions about what is most worth keeping. (The process is complex. Mr. Leonard, at Berkeley, describes the hierarchies of libraries and library-related committees within the system as “fiendishly complicated.”)
Having such evidence in hand makes painful cuts easier to sell to researchers anxious about giving up certain journals or monograph series. Still, “the kinds of analyses that one can do are imperfect,” Ms. Anderson says. Not every journal has an impact factor, for instance, and a journal that has comparatively small usage numbers may still be highly influential in its field. “So we do rely on the campus experts to make final judgments,” she says. “At the end of the day, there’s only so much money, and we have to understand where we can make sacrifices.” The question is not whether there will be pain but who will feel it most sharply.
One approach that can help lessen the pain, and that increasingly aligns with researchers’ changing habits, is to include more open-access content in collections—a cheaper approach than buying content from publishers. The University of California has also stepped up its efforts to get researchers to take advantage of open-access publishing opportunities, Ms. Anderson says. The California system has its own open-access publishing platform, eScholarship, run by the California Digital Library.
The Print Squeeze
The print collections of libraries, however, present yet another challenge. Space for them, and money to maintain them, is becoming very tight. To solve this problem, research libraries are considering collaborations on a whole new level.
Working together is not a novel idea in the library world. Many libraries already belong to consortia that coordinate interlibrary loan programs and use their collective buying power to cut better deals with publishers. The Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium Inc., or Palci, for example, includes 76 libraries in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and West Virginia; and the Greater Western Library Alliance represents 32 research libraries from 17 states in the West and the Midwest.
Such consortia are shaping up to be the foundation of ambitious networks of print repositories. Several have embraced the idea of developing shared print collections, according to Ms. Anderson, and the California libraries are part of a group exploring the idea of a Western Region Storage Trust. or WEST, “a shared print repository infrastructure” serving the Western region of the country, she says. The idea just received a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
If libraries have a guarantee that, say, a print copy of a certain journal is safely archived and accessible elsewhere, they can spend money on other things and avoid duplicating collections. Imagine a supersized interlibrary loan program with an overarching archival philosophy.
“All of these projects involve a level of collaboration across institutions that’s rather unprecedented,” Ms. Anderson says. If it goes well, WEST will outgrow its regional boundaries. “We see this as the beginning of a network that may be a more national collaboration,” Ms. Anderson says.
The Center for Research Libraries, an independent association of academic and research libraries, hopes to coordinate what could become a national or North American strategy. In July it gathered a number of U.S. library consortia and the Ontario Council of University Libraries to talk about collective print-management strategies, reports Bernard F. Reilly, the center’s president. “We promised to come up with a plan for pulling these efforts together,” Mr. Reilly says, referring to WEST and some of the consortium-level strategies under discussion. “People are doing terrific work at the regional level. That’s the only reason it’s feasible at the national level.”
The center intends to present the outlines of such a plan at the American Library Association’s midwinter meeting in January 2010. Mr. Reilly does not underestimate the magnitude of the challenge. There’s “the tendency to want to have things physically close,” he says.
That problem will ease in time, Mr. Reilly believes, as researchers become more comfortable with the idea that they can get their hands on the material even if it isn’t all on the campus-library shelves. “The solution is to get information out to the researchers about how these collections will be taken care of and how available they will be,” Mr. Reilly says.
Mr. Eckman, of Berkeley, believes that WEST has “great potential,” but he cautions that moving quickly presents risks as well as possible rewards. He points out that librarians who must make immediate hard choices “don’t always have the time to work through the ambitious agenda that WEST might have set for itself.”
The current downturn “can make creative responses and collective responses more possible,” Mr. Eckman says. “It could also force more rash decisions.”
