Budget Actions Taken in 2009-2010 (and 2010-2011)
to redress projected shortfalls for 2010-2011 (and 2011-2012)
Each year The Library collection development program experiences inflationary increases that compound from year to year. The Library has not received any new recurring state money for eight years. These two facts result in a structural deficit that grows annually. This year we may also face a campus-mandated reduction to our collections budget that will exacerbate the loss of purchasing power over the past eight years.
Looking at available state funding we estimated a structural deficit in 2009-10 of ~$2.76 million, based on inflation rates of
- 3% for monographs
- 3% for continuations (e.g., monographic series)
- 8% for serials
- 5% for electronic packages
If these inflation rates hold for the following year we anticipate this structural deficit will balloon to ~$3.92 in 2010-2011.
The strategy the Library now is pursuing involves a deliberate reduction of expenditures in order to align our budget with ongoing fund sources. While we reduce our expenditures, we will reorient our development campaign from solicitation of current use funds toward building endowments and funds functioning as endowments. The following are the strategic areas of engagement we are pursuing:
Reduce expenditures. The Library will initiate in FY2010 a two-year project to reduce expenditures on collections. The initial announced cut target is $1.3m or 10.5% of our permanent collections budget. However this target may increase if the campus chooses to reduce the collections base. This target is huge and significantly dwarfs previous reductions that took place in 2004 ($700,000 in cuts) and 2005 ($600,000 in cuts). The bulk of the cuts will come from books and journals expenditure.
Leverage collaborative opportunities. We will continue to work with University of California sister campuses to expand resource sharing programs in place, with a particular emphasis on licensed resource services provided by the California Digital Library. We are working directly with Stanford University Libraries to develop a range of cooperative collection development agreements that will more fully exploit the print resource sharing infrastructure in place between the organizations since 1998. And we will continue to work with appropriate collections-partner institutions in national and international networks.
Expand funding base. The Library capital campaign "Strengthening the Research Collections" will focus on building ongoing sources of non-state collections funds. The target is to create a source of funding that will grow by the annual figure of approximately $600,000 that is needed to cover inflation.
Maintain commitment to transforming the scholarly communication environment. The Library will maintain its commitment to supporting innovative programs such as the Springer "Open Choice" pilot, the SCOAP3 initiative in physics, expanded federal mandates for open publishing of publicly funded research, and the local open access publishing subsidy program (BRII).
