In a bid to bring spending under control, the University has instituted a five-year plan to streamline the library acquisitions budget, a $3.3 million fund used to maintain and add journal subscriptions and purchase books. The University started by not raising this year’s budget, effectively a $115,000 cut, and getting rid of two library staff positions. It plans to cut journal holdings by 10 percent and stabilize budget increases at five percent per year for the next five years.
The cost of periodicals and serials, which accounts for roughly 60 percent of the acquisitions budget, typically increases each year by six to eight percent. In order to retain all current holdings this year, library officials and faculty members eliminated paper editions of journals and serials accessible online, saving $53,000. The remaining $62,000 will come out of the funds used to acquire books.
Even with a five percent increase in the budget next year, the library will overspend its budget by $170,000 if the current subscriptions are maintained, according to a summary of the budget plan on the library website. Administrators and library officials have presented the faculty with a list of the journals from which the 10 percent to be cut will come, according to Associate Professor of Chemistry T. David Westmoreland.
Associate University Librarian Patricia Tully said that even those journal and serials titles whose subscriptions are cancelled will remain available to students through interlibrary loan.
“Cancelled titles are not therefore inaccessible,” she said. “The library has an excellent interlibrary loan service that provides books and periodical articles from other libraries.”
Some disagree with the assertion that materials will be as easily accessible through the interlibrary loan service. According to the library website, the interlibrary loan service is subject to “the delays of mail service” and there is no guarantee on how long items will take to arrive.
“Students are likely to be disproportionately affected [by the cut] since they are often working under deadlines that cannot wait for interlibrary loan deliveries,” Westmoreland said.
Faculty and staff have also expressed concern that the cuts will affect the quality of instruction and research.
“I feel that the library is one of Wesleyan’s great strengths, but I do think that the cuts could begin to affect the depth and quality of the collections across all subjects,” said Science Librarian and Interim CTW Librarian Steven Bischof. “Especially since these cuts are prejudiced towards smaller publishers and scholarly societies.”
Lecturer in the Molecular Biology and Biochemistry (MB&B) Department Melissa Marcucci said that she has already felt the impact of the cuts in her class this semester, even though only paper editions have been eliminated so far.
“Many of the faculty in the MB&B and [Biology] departments design upper-level courses based entirely on readings derived from scientific journals,” she said. “Certainly within the realm of my course, Real Science vs. Pseudoscience, I have had to choose materials carefully because of the nature of the course, but to then not have access to the best articles to make a point clearly is disappointing.”
According to Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Joseph Bruno, the budget amendments do not represent a new approach to library acquisitions on the part of the University. Rather, he said, the University is allowing librarians to best support academics by getting rid of unnecessary expenses. Meerts and Bruno call this the “access model”—the favoring of access to journals over their physical ownership.
“No library can afford to own everything, so an access model has been a big part of the library mission for some time,” he said. “Rather, we are aiming to provide our librarians with the budgetary flexibility to seek new access avenues and increase the information at our disposal. The periodic assessment of holdings is precisely the job of a librarian, and Wesleyan’s librarians have been completely committed to our academic mission. I certainly don’t see this as an exception.”
This is consistent with the position of administration officials, who point to the amount of money in the library budget as proof that the University’s academic mission is being fully supported. According to Vice President for Finance and Administration John Meerts, the University’s acquisitions budget is the highest among all liberal arts colleges with the exception of the multiple Claremont colleges, if taken collectively.
“Our acquisitions budget is the envy of other liberal arts institutions,” Tully said. “However, periodicals costs increase substantially each year, and each year new electronic serials and databases become available. Faculty regularly request that the library subscribe to these new resources. Occasionally it is necessary for the library to work with faculty to review our subscriptions and cancel resources that are less-used, so we can continue to comply with requests to subscribe to resources that best support teaching, learning, and research at Wesleyan.”
Meerts also argues that the University is taking academic considerations into account in determining how best to allocate resources. In his mind, the library will not be adversely affected by the budget cuts.
“I strongly believe that Wesleyan is very mindful of the academic importance of the library and its acquisitions budget and supports it commensurately,” he said.
According to information obtained by the Argus, University Librarian Barbara Jones holds that the budget plan represents a move toward a new acquisitions strategy.
“I very much respect the concerns expressed about this, but I really believe that this is more than a budget-cutting exercise,” Jones wrote in an e-mail responding to librarians who brought her an alternative suggestion. “I believe that this is a positive step towards a new economic model of library acquisitions. It is going to be painful, but I remain convinced that we need to move in this direction.”
Several faculty members, however, have questioned the administration’s commitment to consulting professors in its decision-making and allege that the budget cut is being implemented improperly.
“In essence, fundamental questions of academic policy are being decided by fiscal and administrative officers of the university, with no input from those who bear the primary responsibility for the academic health of the institution,” Westmoreland said. “We should insist that if the library wants to us to review the holdings, we should do precisely that. The library should lead a comprehensive review starting in the fall and involving faculty at the outset under the sponsorship of the [Educational Policy Committee (EPC)]. In the meantime, we should avoid draconian cuts until the review can be completed.”
Westmoreland has asked the EPC to bring a motion to the faculty committee in order to force a reevaluation of the budget plan in the years beyond 2007-2008. Such a measure, he said, is aimed at forging a new consensus between faculty and administration officials on a plan that would realize financial realities without sacrificing the University’s academic mission.
This is an account disputed by Tully, who claims that faculty members have been closely involved in the decision-making process through the efforts of library liaisons and Jones.
“Barbara Jones…has been actively involved in getting the word out to faculty and students about scholarly communication issues,” Tully said. “This fall she gave a presentation on scholarly communication at a faculty meeting and spoke at several faculty functions.”
According to Westmoreland, the administration provided the faculty only with a list of titles from which faculty members could choose to cut in order to meet a dollar target. Faculty members, he said, have not been given information on usage and CTW accessibility.
“The success of this process will be measured solely by whether a target dollar amount has been reached, not whether the collections better suit our teaching and research needs,” Westmoreland said.
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