Sky-rocketing costs are forcing officials to gut the university’s libraries of academic journals that faculty say are crucial resources for researchers and students.
For the fourth year in a row, library officials and faculty members are working in conjunction to get rid of about 9 percent of the university library system’s scholarly journal collection because they do not have the necessary resources to support the rising costs of already-expensive academic journals. During the past five years, the price of scholarly publications has increased more than the rate of the inflation, and officials say the cost is unsustainable.
“We’re getting to the point where all the stuff is important,” said Timothy Hackman, an English and linguistics librarian. “We’ve already gotten rid of the fat, now we are getting to the stuff that hurts.”
The library system will release a list of journals slated to be cut from each department on Friday, Hackman said, adding librarians worked closely with faculty to generate the list based on cost-per-use and popularity among researchers. If faculty object to a particular choice, they must find a replacement journal to cut.
The university will cut research journals in every discipline regardless of how much the price of their subscriptions have increased. Music journals are the cheapest at about $160 each per year while a chemistry journal costs more than $3,000 on average each year. Science, technology, engineering and medicine have been the priciest journals in the past, but now the price of humanities journals is also rising exponentially, Hackman said. While prices of subscription-based journals increased from 9 percent to 10 percent in 2008, international titles in the humanities and social sciences increased by 11 percent.
“We are at the point where people have to sacrifice things they don’t want to get rid of,” Hackman said.
Access to research in a professor’s sphere is critical because professors “do not work in a vacuum,” University Senate Chair-Elect Elise Miller-Hooks said. She added that as professors seek grants for their research and try to publish their work, they look to scholarly journals to read up on past research in the area.
Faculty are forced to “scurry” to find articles in other libraries or request works through interlibrary loan. Looking in other libraries can be very time-consuming and inefficient, Associate Provost Mahlon Straszheim said.
Interlibrary loans are also costly because universities have to clear copyrights to share materials. As scholarly journals continue to diminish on the campus, it will take faculty longer to perform their research as they struggle to find resources, Miller-Hooks added.
“We are all very concerned,” she said.
The crunch is not unique to this university – every library in the country is facing the same dilemma, Straszheim said.
Administrators are hopeful that a new dean, who has yet to be selected, will be able to amend the library system at the university. Like every other department, the library system is required to return 2 percent of its budget to the university, but, Straszheim said, the system could end up with more funding if the Provost decides to reinvest money from that pool into the library system’s thin budget.
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