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Governance Minutes ArchiveNovember 7, 1990
These minutes were approved as submitted at the ULC meeting on December 5, 1990. UNIVERSITY LIBRARY COMMITTEE MINUTES November 7, 1990 PRESENT: John Bowen, Vet Med Kara Goldberg, SGA Carol Burch-Brown, Provost's Office Arthur Keown, Business Norman Dodl, Education Bon Richardson, for Arts & Sci. Holly Ferguson, CSAC J. D. Stahl, Faculty Senate Paul Gherman, Library Rod Young, Agri. & Life Sci. GUESTS: Bill Kuster, SGA John Straw, Library Paul Metz, Library ABSENT: Edward Fox, Arts & Sciences Michael Vorster, Engineering Ken McCleary, Human Resources Karen Watson, GSA J. Scott Poole, Architecture MEETING SUMMARY: The meeting was called to order at 4:04 p.m., and the minutes of the October meeting were approved as submitted. After a brief report from the Director, the rest of the meeting was devoted to Paul Metz's presentation on the Serials Review Project. The minutes of this presentation are fairly long and detailed owing to the importance of the subject and the need for information sharing. REPORTS: I. LIBRARY ANNOUNCEMENTS (P. Gherman): A. The CD-ROM network installed in the second floor reference area links a number of CD-ROM databases. Within a few weeks, the library plans to conduct a trial of putting this network on the CBX, so that faculty will be able to access the databases from around campus. Some problems are still being worked out, such as how to queue the dial-ins, if too many occur at once, therefore, it will truly be an experiment to see if it can be made to work. B. The library has received word that it will be a participant, with the National Agriculture Library, North Carolina State and about a dozen other land-grant institutions, to experiment in transmitting full-text bitmap documents over the internet. This has been successfully tried between NAL and NC State. Now the experiment will test whether it is feasible to transmit scanned documents back and forth over the internet. The long-term advantage will be the ability to transmit documents directly to faculty work stations rather than to fax machines. This ultimate result is still a long way from reality. C. VTLS Word Search capability is still being tested. The library is awaiting delivery and installation of a greater amount of storage for the library's computer. Once that is done, the library will bring up word searching for use by the librarians, who will test the impact of word searching on the system. NEW BUSINESS: II. REPORT ON THE SERIALS REVIEW PROJECT (P. Metz): Paul Metz's presentation to the University Library Committee is the first step in the Serials Review Project which will be on-going during this academic year. The project involves the comprehensive review of the library's serial holdings preparatory to necessary cancellations. The library plans to involve faculty in the process as much as possible, to communicate what is being done, why it is being done, and to solicit input from the faculty. For faculty input to have real value there are certain things they need to know. This presentation begins the process of disseminating the information the faculty will need to understand and is divided into four general areas: why we have to conduct the review and cancellation project; the philosophical guidelines for the project; how the library proposes to proceed; and finally, how the committee can help. Dr. Metz used a series of overhead transparencies to illustrate his presentation (see attached-ALL TABLES & FIGURES REFERRED TO WILL BE FOUND AT THE END OF THE MINUTES) The main problem the library faces is serials inflation. Serials or continuations refer mainly to journals, but also to proceedings, annuals, directories, reference sets, and monographic standing orders (series of monographs published irregularly). The worst inflation is occurring in scientific serials published in Europe. Fundamentally, the problem is an increasingly monopolistic situation; every journal, by its nature, is unique, and journal publishing is increasingly centralized. (See Table 1 for price increases in sample journal titles, and Table 2 for the frequency distribution of expensive journals. The second table illustrates journals subscribed to by this library; these are yearly subscription prices.) This inflation is devastating the library materials budget. (See Table 3 for the 6-year trend in the materials budget.) Particularly disquieting is the effect on the balance between serials purchases and firm order purchases which the library tries to maintain (firm order referring to any purchase made on a one time basis). Serials account for about 70% of the materials budget and binding, approval plans, and memberships, etc., account for about 10%, leaving just 20% for firm orders, where, of course, inflation has also occurred. (See Table 4, the 6-year trend in the library's purchasing power.) Concurrently with this inflation, in the last 10 or 15 years, the library's share of the university budget has dropped from about 3 1/2% to about 2 1/2%. In this same time span, whole new formats have been developed. A decade ago the library didn't have Dow Jones, Westlaw, PschLit or ERIC on CD-ROM, video cassettes or music on CDs. And also the decade has seen many new and excellent journals begin publication. In 1978 there were 60,000 journals; last year there were 133,000 journals published. The library is committed to maintaining the budgetary flexibility necessary to order the truly outstanding new journals. Because of the state's current fiscal situation, the library has lost the money it had expected to receive during the second year of the biennium from new initiative funding. Table 5 illustrates the price increases during 1990/91 from the three largest European science publishers, and Table 6 illustrates the inflation which is anticipated by Faxon, our major vendor. These increases are for the current year, and the library can cover these from the new initiative money which the library did receive for the first year of the biennium. The problem will occur next year. We already know the budget will be flat, at best, and that anticipated inflation will cost somewhere between an additional $200,00 to $400,00. During the past decade of inflation the library has made cuts in the number of monographs purchased because firm orders have received a diminishing share of the materials budget. If next year's necessary cuts all came out of books the library would have experienced a 60% drop in books orders since 1983-84. For every 5 books purchased in 1983-84, the library would be buying only 2 next year. This cannot continue, and explains why the library must now make plans to cancel serials. Figure 1 lists the main goals and philosophical guidelines to which the library will adhere in arriving at the necessary cancellations (see attached). Cutting operating funds before materials is a firm goal, but obviously can be carried only so far. ARL statistics show this library already near the top in percentage of library budget spent for materials, so there is little fat remaining in the operations budget. The library intends to preserve book purchasing and has gone as far as it can in reducing the firm order share of the materials budget. Twenty-nine percent of all use of the collection is circulation (books), and there is a surprisingly large use of monographs in-house as well. In addition, books are important in cross- disciplinary use. The library intends to maintain the budgetary flexibility to order the very best new journals. Three main criteria will be used to arrive at the cuts. 1) Scope: there are titles that are popular, but that don't really support university programs; those will have to be cut. 2) Price: decisions to buy journals are almost always made on the quality of the journal, not its price, but now there will be cases where some strong but overpriced journals will have to be cut. The library will try to convert some of these subscriptions to film, if possible. 3) Use: the library will cancel what is not used. The staff conducted a study to document the use of current journals last spring, and is currently conducting a study of the use of bound journals in order to provide adequate statistics. Use data alone will not drive the project, but they will inform it. The librarians will prepare lists for each department of journals and other continuations proposed for cancellation. These will be much longer lists than even the worst-case scenario of what would actually be cut. The reason for this is to give the faculty some choice. This first list will be department specific, and will be given to each department's library representative to circulate to all department faculty. Meanwhile, librarians will be preparing a general list of suggested cuts in newspapers, back-up copies, reference room source books, etc. The departmental lists, with faculty comments, will come back into the library, where the bibliographers will then compare and adjudicate, before returning the composite list and the general list to all departments for further comment and for faculty to check for cross-disciplinary needs. Ultimately, the library is trying to avoid a quota-based kind of mentality in arriving at these cuts. To reiterate, the list will identify the serials that may be canceled. It will be a longer-than-necessary list, not only to allow faculty a choice, but also so that should the following year again be a flat budget year it will not be necessary to repeat the entire exercise. Figure 2 shows the tentative time schedule for this project. Figure 3 shows ways in which the faculty can help. If the library had not had a decreasing share of the university budget in the last decade, it would not be faced with the problem in this magnitude. However, the fault also lies with journal publishers, some of whom are guilty of price gouging. Further, it is very important that the faculty understand why the library is determined to protect the book side of the materials budget from a further loss. The necessity for serials cancellations is a painful, complex, and easily misunderstood issue. Paul Metz, Paul Gherman, and the bibliographers are all available to answer questions or help in any way they can to inform the teaching faculty and to listen to faculty concerns and comments. The meeting was adjourned at 5:10 p.m. TABLE 1 Price Increases, Sample Journal Titles Title 1981 1987 Current Behavioral Brain Research $85 $468 $1,044 Jour. of Financial Economics 74 386 417 Engr. Fracture Mechanics 183 713 1,660 Linear Algebra & its Applications 342 923 1,275 Jour. of Multivariate Analysis 81 246 400 Nutrition Research 75 215 423 TABLE 2 Highly Expensive Journals, Frequency Distribution Number of Journals Price Range 5 $5,000+ 9 $3,000-4,999 12 $2,000-2,999 92 $1,000-1,999 NOTES: 1. Includes Faxon titles only; am trying to obtain comparable data for our other subscription agents. 2. Excludes indexes and abstracts; true journals only. 3. Several of the titles over $5,000 are journal packages, usually including 3-4 closely related journals. TABLE 3 Six Year Trend in Library Materials Budget 1983-84 1989-90 Subscriptions & Standing Orders $1,393,500 $2,365,000 %age Change +69.7% Firm Orders $749,700 $722,400 %age Change -3.6% Materials Total $2,333,900 $3,390,500 %age Change +45.3% Firm Order as %age of Materials 32.1% 21.3% TABLE 4 Library's Monographic Purchasing Power, Six Year Trend Fiscal Year Firm Order Expend. Unadj. %age Inflation Real Loss 1983-84 $749,700 3.6% 39.7% 31.0% 1989-90 $722,400 TABLE 5 Mean Journal Price Increases 1990 to 1991, for Key European Publishers (LSU subscription list) Publisher Increase Elsevier 35% Pergamon 27% Springer-Verlag 26% TABLE 6 Journal Inflation, Va Tech Subscriptions with Faxon, 1989/90 to 1990/91 Domestic 12% Foreign 23% Weighted Average 17.5% NOTE: Subscriptions are 1/3 foreign in titles, 1/2 foreign in dollars. FIGURE 1. Goals and Philosophical Guidelines * Cut operating funds first, materials last * Preserve book purchasing * Preserve the ability to buy the very best new journals * Cut duplicate titles first * Cut ephemera first * Base cuts on: Scope - cancel materials not supporting key university missions Price - it will be necessary to cancel a number of reputable, used, but overpriced journals Use - cancel serial titles which are not used * Work closely with and listen to the faculty * Propose many more candidates than will be cut * Identify titles for future cancellation, if necessary * Cancellations represent library's best assessment of university- wide needs and are not based on fixed percentage of each fund code FIGURE 2 Anticipated Time Table Dec 30 Use data compiled Feb 8 Department Lists sent to liaisons for review Mar 1 Library internal review completes General List - newspapers, reference sets, duplicates Mar 15 Departments conclude review of Departmental Lists Apr 5 Master List (all Department Lists and General List) back out to departments May 3 Departments respond May 31 Cancellation list completed FIGURE 3 How You Can Help Us * Obviously, any support in reversing the downward trend in %age of university budget would help. Richmond and Burruss must understand our woes. * But also help colleagues understand that no funding source would reasonably be asked to keep up with this level of inflation. * Help colleagues understand that we are digging our heels in on books because the violence we've already done is measurable and very harmful. * Share information you have. * Tell your colleagues that this is a complex problem which the grapevine will easily misconstrue. Refer them to us and urge them to call us. We'll be available.
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