The libraries are in trouble, and the university administration knows it.
The worsening situation of the university’s libraries has sparked reaction from the campus community, leading the provost to create a Blue Ribbon Task Force to assess the situation, the Strategic Planning Committee to emphasize the library’s importance in campus research and the administration to continue searching for a permanent dean of libraries.
The Blue Ribbon Task Force – an independent body composed of eight faculty members charged with the responsibility of assessing the libraries’ future goals and direction in light of their present situation – will report to the University Senate and Provost in November. Its findings will help craft a strategic plan specifically tailored to address growing library problems and concerns.
“[The task force] is essential to the future of the libraries,” Interim Dean of Libraries Desider Vikor said. “I’m extremely delighted to see that libraries have such a high priority.”
In preparation for the November presentation, the University Senate was presented with last year’s library council report explaining why the libraries are in such bad shape.
Because of state budget cuts, the rising costs of research materials and, more recently, a university-wide hiring freeze, libraries are facing a crisis officials say could disable them in the future. If left unchanged, libraries would have to cut academic journal subscriptions and stretch thin the current faculty and resources to make up the monetary difference, limiting available resources for students, faculty and researchers.
“Campus-wide, this is a difficult year, financially,” Vikor said. “But we face difficulties other departments don’t. And no one on campus has the luxury of deficit spending.”
If the condition of university libraries continue to worsen, library officials, professors and students may begin to see thinning programs and resources – Late Night Study was on the chopping block this summer in an attempt to cut costs – in the already-struggling institution, officials said.
“We are a research university, and we have a very strong profile,” Vikor said. “This is not an insignificant problem.”
Over the years, the university libraries have fallen further behind those of peer institutions and prompted some to question their ability to function as the library system of a major research institution.
“We have always compared ourselves to our peers, but we continue to fall so far behind them that it’s become kind of a silly comparison,” former Library Council Chair James Klumpp said. “All libraries are feeling some kind of inflation, but we keep falling further behind because [peer institutions] are responding by funding them accordingly.”
According to a library council report presented to the senate last week, the university’s library system is the smallest in terms of information amassed and has the fewest journal subscriptions when compared with the five other peer institutions.
This limited access has already begun to impact researchers.
“It makes everyone’s job a little more difficult when funding is cut,” said Damon Austin, a library researcher who helps students research topics related to the environment, nutrition, veterinary medicine and more. “You can absolutely notice the impact it’s having on our available resources.”
Vikor said shrinking availability of resources is primarily impacted by increasing costs of academic and research journals, paired with tightening university and state budgets.
“We have been trying to minimize and eliminate paper versions of journals and go online for financial reasons,” Vikor said. “But the online option is not a cheap one. That’s a myth.”
Despite a university-wide hiring freeze, Vikor said the provost approved hiring for some necessary vacant library positions in light of present circumstances, though there are still a “fair amount of positions” that will be left open.
But the pending search for a permanent dean and the strategic plan’s mention of the libraries as a “critical enabler” – a stipulation included to appease faculty outrage at the lack of mention of the libraries in the original version of the strategic plan – leaves officials optimistic.
“If the budget can be stabilized rather than us losing money, that’s a step in the right direction. The strategic plan is a move in the right direction,” Klumpp said. “The more sets of eyes we have looking at the problem, so much the better.”
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