Lombardi sets aside $3.1m for Library system

by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

     "It's wonderful news," said Robert Rothstein, who chaired the Research Library Council of the Faculty Senate until last month. "Director Crist and the council have worked hard to raise consciousness about the centrality of the library to everything the University does.

     "Obviously Chancellor Lombardi doesn't need his consciousness raised, but there's still work to be done to encourage increased public and private support to guarantee that we have the kind of library that the campus needs and deserves."

     "It represents an enormous effort on the part of the campus," Crist said. "It's just phenomenal for them to step into that huge gap left because of a 90 percent cut in ERM. We're extremely grateful."

     Crist said the Libraries had been looking at having to let go of another round of journal subscriptions.
     
     "This allows us to avoid making further cancellations and reducing the book budget," she said.

     State funding for the Libraries' acquisitions budget had plunged from $4.4 million in Fiscal Year 2001 to $400,000 in FY03. The $3.1 million the campus is now providing returns the budget to FY02 levels.

     In mid-September Lombardi told the Faculty Senate the campus needed to build the Libraries' needs into its budget "step by step" and cease to rely on the ERM, which, as a separate line item, is more vulnerable to budget cuts, he said.

     "We're going to do it step by step," Crist echoed Lombardi. "This is an important first step, but it's going to have to take steps beyond that to build the research library that the campus wants.

     "A line like ERM is not a safe way to plan for a research library. This is a set of materials where the annual inflation is pretty high. Having a line [in the state budget] that isn't reliable for supporting those materials isn't useful."

     The ERM cut came at a time when the Libraries had already sustained big losses in their acquisitions budget, Crist said. During a previous round of budget cuts in the fall of 2001, the Libraries cancelled $1.2 million in journal subscriptions and reduced book purchasing by 50 percent. Those cuts remain, so Crist said she hopes future steps by the campus can restore that funding.

     But even were dollar amounts to return to FY01 levels, not all cuts to journal subscriptions could be undone, Crist said. Inflation among serials and books has outstripped the Consumer Price Index for more than a decade. While the CPI rose 46 percent between 1986 and 1999, the average cost of periodicals jumped 207 percent. Restoring the Libraries' buying power would mean raising funding beyond FY01 levels.
"We are very much still on the low end of our peers," Crist said. Last spring Crist informed the Faculty Senate that the campus ranking among the 113 Association of Research Libraries had fallen below 100 in several categories, including money spent on books and size of staff.

     "From a collections point of view we're not in what we would call a healthy place yet," she said this week. "We're very solid for undergraduates, but we need to do some rebuilding and building if the Library's going to continue supporting the research enterprise."

     The campus is scheduled for a mid-cycle review by an accreditation team next fall, she said.

     The five-year [examination] includes reporting on the Library," she said. "They wanted to see improvement of the Library on acquisitions, staffing, and facilities. So you can see the challenge."

     Crist noted that work on the decking at the Du Bois Library is scheduled to start in the spring, so the Library will be able to report on improvement to its facilities.

     In the meantime, Crist said she is grateful for extraordinary support from the Friends of the Library, who announced Sept. 29 that its annual-giving contribution to the Libraries would be $75,000 this year.

     "That's really an enormous contribution on their part and a way for us to acquire things that don't fit into the state funding that easily," she said. "Sometimes there will be a more expensive item that we would like to have that's out of our ordinary reach. We're able to build something more special with the Friends' money."

     The Libraries also are part-way through a 5-year campaign to raise $1 million for an endowment. The campaign has raised $388,000 so far, she said.