Library Budget Request FY 1997 - 1998

I.   Introduction

In the last five years, the University’s financial constraints have combined with structural changes in the economics of scholarly publishing to reduce the quality of The Library’s collections and services.   In nominal terms, permanent state funds available for collections will have remained relatively static in the years 1990 to 2000.   At the same time, net buying power has suffered severe erosion from double digit inflation in the price of publications, primarily journals.   As a con sequence, the annual increment of collection materials available to scholars is declining in both absolute terms, and relative to Berkeley’s peer institutions.   The campus has partially offset the damage to collections through non-recurring funds.   But as yet no recurring funding strategy for inflation supplements to collections has emerged to replace the Voigt-Susskind formula of earlier years.   However, even if Voigt-Susskind were still in use, it would not be adequate to support ne w academic programs and new forms of scholarly publishing.   Concurrent with the rapid inflationary increases noted, scholarly information available in digital form has also increased exponentially.   This has created new demands from faculty and students, requiring new investments in both content and the requisite network infrastructure to deliver that content, and new programs for information delivery and user assistance.

Simultaneously, mandated reductions in the operating budget, combined with three successive early retirement programs, have resulted in a loss of about one-third of the academic staff and an overall staff reduction of nearly 20%.   Nonetheless, The Library has remained in full operation.   Apart from the consolidation of several small branches into the new Biosciences and Government/Social Science Libraries, The Library has continued to operate the same large network of branch facilities since the opening of Moffitt in the 1970’s.   Aggressive internal productivity improvement programs have helped absorb the budget reductions and keep the system open.   Now, however, the strains of maintaining this traditional operation are begin ning to show.   The evidence is apparent in all phases of Library activity:

• Staffing levels are no longer adequate both to operate all the branches and to support a full range of specialist librarians.   The latter are essential to provide research services, work with faculty to build collections, and instr uct students to find and use information in print or online resources.   The ratio of librarians to non-academic library staff has fallen in order to keep branches open and provide basic circulation services.   Berkeley’s ratio of librarians t o faculty has fallen far below that of peer institutions.   The preservation of operations staff at the cost of professional specialists has resulted in a widespread reduction of Library academic skills necessary for selection, instruction, and rese arch support to faculty and graduate students.   With less than 1 FTE Librarian per branch in some places, instructional, research and reference services are now below faculty and student expectations.   Critical disciplinary specialties must remain unfilled until attrition produces the vacancies needed to support new hiring.   In the meantime, The Library lacks subject specialists for important academic programs such as Art History, Classics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Judaica.   Neither can it handle specialized materials, e.g., Music, Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian cataloging, or curation of Bancroft’s priceless pictorial collections.

• The impact of inflation on the collections budget will translate in FY 1997-98 into a major cancellation of journals, which now absorb about two-thirds of the collections budget.   Overall the average annual inflation rate for scholarly publications has been in the 11% to 13% range through the 1990’s.  One of the largest scientific journal publishers has just announced price increases for next year averaging 20%.   In the face of a nominally flat budget, subscription cancella tions will have to approximate the inflation rate.   The Library expects to cancel 3,000 to 5,000 of its paid subscriptions next year and a similar number again the year after.   Then, in FY 1999-2000, at the end of temporary augmentation fund ing of $940,000, The Library will face the largest cutback ever in its collections program.   The combination of funding loss and inflation in that single year will equal about 25% of the collections budget, for a cumulative three year reduction of about 50%.   Although the Chancellor has provided $940,000 per year in bridge funds for three years to ameliorate the effects of inflation on the collections, the augmentation will not even cover normal inflation during the first year.

  In FY 1996-97, the campus also allocated $250,000 for development of digital library resources, and this allocation will provide a significant foundation of online resources supporting research and instruction.

• With existing funds fully absorbed by collections and operating commitments, The Library has no financial margin available for needed investments that would allow it to change to new service models and test digital collections strategies.
  60; Equipment replacement needs, mainly for computer systems, will amount to about $700,000 per year.   There is a backlog of facilities programs, both deferred maintenance and incomplete projects, totaling about $15 million.   This does not include funds that might be necessary for either relocation or physical improvements related to Library branches in buildings needing seismic work, such as Earth Sciences, Hildebrand or Wurster.

Clearly The Library cannot continue to operate in traditional ways against the backdrop of such stark budgetary constraints.   Therefore the FY 1997-98 budget proposes several initiatives that promise to assist with a Library transformation by the e nd of the decade.   The intent is to live within constrained fiscal resources, yet to operate in ways that provide improved service by taking advantage of emerging technologies.   In this budget The Library asks for limited term bridge financi ng to use for the investments needed to make this transformation.

II. Restructuring The Library's Services

Research and instructional services to the campus community are the first priority of The Library.   These services, however, must continue in the face of changes in patterns of scholarly communication, new research programs on campus, and emerging methods in teaching and learning.   To restructure them within budgetary constraints will require both bridge funding to support new initiatives and reallocation of recurring resources to sustain services.

Access and Administrative Services have already undergone cuts and re-engineering.   Thus the only other variables are to close Library branches, or to re-define the level and kind of public services in the branches.   There is a strong faculty preference for local branch libraries, and in any case central stack space is insufficient to consolidate all branch library collections.   Moreover, the Library service ideal has been to provide research services by professional librarian discipli nary specialists on demand to all comers at reference desks in every branch;   this ideal has not been feasible for many years.   A new service model will emerge to achieve four primary goals:

1.   Increase User Self-sufficiency:

• Replace on demand reference desk services with Teaching Library programs.
  The Teaching Library offers cost-effective group training in the use of print and digital collections, preparing students and faculty for self-sufficient use of The Library.   Once the Teaching Library becomes our primary means for users to learn t he informational discovery and access tools that will enable them to become self-sufficient, many branch libraries could provide only reading room services during most hours.   Specialized research consulting would continue to be available by appoin tment at more centralized locations.

• Build or buy technologies for self-sufficiency.
  The Library will buy and test self-checkout technologies to reduce the cost of maintaining branches.  Self-service circulation systems will allow us to substitute card-key access for staffed, publicly open branches during the evenings, and can min imize staffing during other hours.

2.   Strengthen Network Services:

• Increase the amount of scholarly information available online.
  In cooperation with the Office of the President, Berkeley is negotiating licenses to more than 2,000 scholarly journals over the next two years.   In addition, The Library will also develop or purchase more extensive online reference tools that can provide answers to a broader array of inquiries.  As networked resources become available online, faculty and students will have access to the information they need at all hours of the day and night, and from any facility on campus or from their hom es.   Ultimately the online subscriptions will lead to the cancellation of print copies, thus reducing recurring operating costs.

• Implement programs to assist networked users.
  During the next few years, thousands of scholarly journals will become available on the network, complementing the dozens of indexing and abstracting services, local CD-ROM networks, and Internet services already available to the campus community.   As information supporting research and instruction increasingly moves to the Internet, The Library will need to develop new forms of information service.   These may include innovations such as online kiosks and interactive tutorials so that facult y and students can get the help they need when they are working online, outside the physical library.

3.   Strengthen Research Services:

• Create specialized research facilities in Doe Library.
  The seismic renovations of Doe Library have changed use patterns within the facility.   Basic information and referral services now take place in the Information Center on the first floor of Doe, near the North entry.   Though there is no requ est for funding in this budget, The Library has begun planning to reconfigure the second floor of Doe to provide improved research facilities for faculty and graduate students in Humanities and Areas studies.   Ultimately we plan to create specializ ed research environments such as that in the Government and Social Sciences Information Service, and will reduce staffing commitments by eliminating the duplicative reference services on Doe’s second floor.   In addition, Graduate Services, which wa s temporarily removed from Doe for the seismic project, can return, thereby restoring undergraduate study space within Moffitt.   The Library may request funds for this project in FY 1998-99.

• Recruit and/or train librarians with broad skill mixes.
  As the number of professional librarians at Berkeley has decreased, UC Berkeley’s faculty and academic programs have continued to grow and change.   At present, The Library does not have recurring funds available to hire any new librarians.   F or the foreseeable future, it will not be possible to support every academic program with a specialist Librarian unless the colleges and schools choose to fund new positions in their areas.   If we reduce the recurring operations budget through imple mentation of new service models, it may be feasible to begin selectively hiring new librarians.   However, each new academic position will have to incorporate a wider range of responsibilities than was the norm when the Library had more professional positions.

4.   Manage demand from external clients:

• Strengthen the primary clientele policy.
  There is now substantial demand by the public, CSU students and commercial enterprises for walk-in, on-demand, research services.  The demand is particularly great in the business, science, engineering and Bancroft libraries.   Though public complaints would be likely, The Library can restrict its services to University patrons during most operating hours.   This policy would also require that the Alumni Association and Extension either stop extending library services to the public, or compensate The Library for services it now must give away.   In the long term, The Library must negotiate fee-for-service agreements with other segments of higher education, and provide information to external clientele primarily over the network ra ther than through onsite, on-demand services.

III.   The Budget Request

1.   Collections

Base Budget Augmentation:   Unless there is a budgetary augmentation to cover inflation, The Library must reduce its acquisitions by about 50% over the next three years.  During that period, The Library will implement use and pe rformance based criteria to ascertain the least damaging ways to reduce the rate of growth of collections.   These criteria will include development of full-cost models for providing print and digital information.  The objective will be to a scertain if The Library can reduce operating costs (the anticipated result of a transition from print to digital formats) to help support collections.   It will explore partnerships with other institutions and commercial services to provide document delivery, attempt to reduce the rate of rise in collections costs through use of networked resources and, possibly, implement new pricing models.   Despite the measures taken to soften the impact of a reduction of 50% in Library buying power, there will be deleterious impacts on the availability of scholarly information supporting academic programs.   To reduce the seriousness of the impact of inflation during the coming year, The Library is requesting a $750,000 increase (about 10%) to the b ase budget for collections.

Digital Library Supplement:   During the next three years, publishers of scholarly and scientific information are offering contracts to make core journals available on the Internet, facilitating The Library’s long-term goal of making a s much information available over the network as possible.   In the long term, online journals should experience lower price inflation than has been customary for print.   During the transition phase, however, the cost of providing these elect ronic journals will add to the cost of the print subscriptions.   To fund the incremental cost of online collections over the next three years, The Library requests continuation of the $250,000 digital library supplement.

2.   Services

The Library proposes several budget requests that will facilitate the goal of making library users more self-sufficient.

Self-service Libraries.   By implementing card-key access and self-checkout systems, The Library can expand the number of hours during which collections are available to faculty and students, while simultaneously reducing the cost of o perating branches.   We propose a prototype project to convert four libraries to card-key access, providing 24 hour availability of the collections, and with self-checkout systems that will reduce staff costs for circulation services.   To dev elop these prototypes, we request $175,000 in one-time investment funds.

Teaching Library Program.   The Library seeks to improve information literacy among undergraduates and to make both faculty and students more self sufficient in identifying and using information resources in print, multimedia or digita l form.

We request funds for the following three projects to strengthen the teaching programs and ultimately reduce the costs of providing onsite reference services through the use of technology.

Managing Demand.   The Library requests funding augmentation to assist in support to users who are not in primary clientele categories.   Specifically, we have identified about 4,000 users who either receive free access or who mak e an access payment that does not remain with The Library.   These individuals, either Alumni Association members or unaffiliated patrons, represent nearly 10% of The Library's patron base, yet The Library receives no budget allocation to subsidize them.   In this budget, we request a permanent augmentation of $400,000 to help continue providing services to these patrons.

Other.   The Library requests continuation of SEIP funds at the current level of $126,000 to continue the high level of circulation services in the Main/Moffitt complex.

IV.   Conclusion

- Peter Lyman
University Librarian
January 15, 1997

• If you have questions regarding the budget, please email: Mike Rancer, Director of Financial Planning and Administration.
• To the chart: Summary of the Library Budget Request FY 1997-1998

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