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March 14, 2011
Dear Faculty Member:
The Library is preparing to implement severe cuts to the collection budget for FY 11/12. Our best estimates indicate that cuts will range from 20% to 31.5% for periodicals, and 9.5% to 22.5% for books. This situation was addressed in the Library’s budget presentation that has been delivered to appropriate units on campus; the actual amount of cuts that the Library will have to implement will be known once ISU sets its budget sometime during the summer of 2011.
The estimates are based on the unfortunate conflation of four independent and unavoidable factors:
- All academic units have been asked to prepare for cuts of 2%, 4%, 5% or 6%.
- FY11/12 will be the fifth consecutive year for which the Library will have received no ongoing funding to offset hyper-inflationary increases in the periodicals budget.
- One-time local funds have been used to offset annual inflation for the past four fiscal years, and starting with FY 11/12 those funds have been reallocated within the university.
- University funding for Web of Science ended in 2010; the Library paid for 2011 access with one-time Library funds. The Deans Council asked the Library to continue the subscription to this valuable indexing resource by increasing the journal cuts for all science and social science departments by an additional 5.5% to pay for the subscription.
To make cuts that are as responsible as possible, we want your assistance. Posted to the library website at http://www.isu.edu/library/coldev/jrnlreview.shtml is a list of journals for each department, and a standing orders list, if applicable. Each journals list contains exact details of the worst case cuts required. I must ask your department to submit a single journals list ranked in order of cancellation preference to the level of the maximum cut noted on your spreadsheet. The ranking will allow us the flexibility of implementing only the amount of cuts that is determined to be necessary once ISU’s FY 11/12 budget becomes known.
We have included on the journals lists information that may assist you in making your decision:
- Column A contains the department’s 2009 rankings or indicators for journals to cancellation from the 2009 journal review.
- Column I provides the number of full article downloads during 2010 for online journal subscriptions. Note - Some publishers, and societies, and some of their multiple access sites, don’t provide usage statistics. If you have questions concerning the completeness of a statistics provided for a journal, please contact Cheryl Sebold (sebocher@isu.edu ,282-3246 or 282-3152).
- In columns J and K there may be information about alternate full text availability in databases and journal packages and related embargo periods, if any.
Your Bibliographer within the Library is available to provide assistance to help you complete this process.
Your recommendations are due to the Library on April 7, 2011. A list of all journals recommended to be cut will be posted on the Library web page shortly thereafter. Please submit recommendations by April 7, 2011 to Cheryl Sebold at sebocher@isu.edu or at Box 8089.
Thank you for your understanding as we work through this difficult economic time.
Sandra Shropshire
Interim Dean/University Librarian
(Excel spreadsheets)