By Sidney Birkett
Nov. 4, 2015
Andersen Library will have to adjust with recent budget cuts to the UW system. The library had a $76,000 cut this year, $60,000 of which would have been used purchase books, media, journals and databases.
The budget cut has prevented them from purchasing a new journal package, a valuable resource to students.
“Last year, every entity on campus was discussing how they might handle the cut,” said Barbara Bren, interim library director.
The library planned to cut one-time purchases, database subscriptions, and journal subscriptions by $20,000 each to evenly distribute the $60,000 cut.
Carol Elsen, Collection Manager, said they decided what to cut based on use. They tried their best to evenly distribute the money between materials, and also focused on what areas had overlapping material. Their goal was to be as fair as possible to everyone using these resources.
On top of this cut, one of the library’s key journal packages, ScienceDirect College Edition, published by Elsevier, will no longer be available after this calendar year.
Elsen said the library had been offered a similar journal package with essentially the same content, but for $60,000 dollars more than the first package. The name of this new package is unavailable.
“It just happens to be the same amount of what our cut was,” Elsen said. So our cut was like $120,000 instead of being just $60,000.”
The library is hoping to get the funding for these new journals. Elsen said the library has made accommodations necessary, but cannot make more cuts without affecting ability for students to get access to the materials they need.
“The reason we are concerned about it is we had such high downloads on our campus – 41,000 downloads from these journals,” Elsen said. “It’s our most used journal package, and so it’s a little scary thinking that our students are going to go without this research material. It’s going to harm students ability to find quality research materials on their topics. The Elsevier journals, very few of them are available elsewhere. It’s pretty exclusive.”
In the top 50 of these journals used, only two of them have any availability elsewhere in the library’s collection. Elsen added, if you don’t get the Elsevier journals, you don’t have many of the resources at all.
Bren and Elsen said they are hopeful for getting the money. They said they’ve provided the information on what they need and how important the information in the journals is, and they have spoken to committees and campus administration on how to see what can be done. Elsen said they have until sometime in December, as the contract for the new, more expensive journals would start Jan. 1.
“If we’re able to get this, [students] won’t notice,” Elsen said.” “They’ll have access to the same kinds of materials they did before.”
