At the request of the president and the provost, and with input from the Faculty Senate Executive Committee, a task force for research library support has been created. This task force was formed to analyze the way the campus libraries purchase material and provide an initial set of recommendations to Chief Information Officer John Kolb by June 15. These recommendations will ultimately impact the library’s performance planning and budgeting for the 2008 fiscal year.
John Harrington, dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, will chair the committee. He believes looking into the future of the library is “viewed as a matter of great importance” by all segments of the campus: faculty, administration, graduate students, and undergraduate students. The resources provided by the library affect all departments, so the membership of this task force includes individuals from all RPI schools with several staff members from the Rensselaer Research Libraries. All those who were asked to be on the task force accepted and are ready for the first meeting or March 8.
This task force has four specific tasks: strengthening faculty involvement and plans to gain scholarly materials, developing a strategy to decrease the budget cost issues that presently plague the library, exploring and recommending long term funding models for future acquisition of materials, and finally exploring the impact of the new or expanding academic programs on library resources based on The Rensselaer Plan.
The problem stems from changes in the way the library provides its services. Over the last decade, there has been a transition from a mainly print-based scholarly collection to a primarily electronic-based collection. This change saw a favorable response by many, especially because it allowed for over 40,000 titles to be available at one’s fingertips. This transition also provided a means to decrease the inflationary cost pressures of printed materials.
Yet with time, these cost pressures have migrated to the electronic publishing arena. Last year alone, the Folsom Library was forced to cut some electronic resources offered to students due to the raising inflation cost of subscriptions. Acting Director of the Rensselaer Research Libraries Bob Mayo stated that, “This is not only a problem at this library but a problem at all academic libraries.”
Many of these high-priced subscriptions are those scholarly journals that comprise about 85 percent of the library’s budget. Also, the library has tried to cut costs by joining with other libraries to subscribe to particular resources such as Science Direct. Thus, the library needs to establish a plan for the future as costs increase and service demands of the library continue to rise.
The Rensselaer Research Libraries will be free to experiment with solutions throughout this process, and there are hopes that this effort will serve as a model for other academic libraries. There will be internal and external research through which the task force will learn about other models and solicit input from faculty members and students.
