When the legislature finally approved the state budget for this year, allocating a .9% increase to SVSU, we fared better than most other institutions of higher education in Michigan. While it could have been much worse, we nevertheless have a very tight budget for library acquisitions this year.

In terms of actual dollars to spend on library materials, we have the same amount this year as last year. While that may not sound so bad, a look at the impact of inflation in the cost of library materials will illustrate why we will be buying less even though the budget is the same.

Last year, the library spent $320,000 to maintain current subscriptions to a group of resources that includes journals, newspapers and online databases. For 2004, the cost of these same resources is projected to increase 12-14%. This means that in order to continue to make these resources available to you, we will have to pay roughly $38,000-45,000 more than last year.

Without any additional dollars in the acquisitions budget to pay for this increase, what are our choices? One option would be to cancel subscriptions to journals, since that’s where the increase is coming from. In order to realize any cost savings this fiscal year, however, we would need to be canceling journals right now, since they are renewed annually in the fall. To do so now would be irresponsible, as there is no time to evaluate the journal collection, compare our holdings to core journal lists in each discipline, seek input from the faculty, or ascertain the actual usage of journal titles.

The only other immediate and viable choice to cover the increased cost of journals is to reduce the amount of funds allocated for books this year. This was definitely not the easiest conclusion to reach. After reducing last year’s allocation for books by the amount needed to cover the anticipated journal subscription increases for 2004, only $77,000 remains to spend on book purchases this year. Given this amount to work with, we debated how to divide it fairly among all of the academic departments. In the end, dividing it fairly meant dividing it equally into allocations of $2,000 per department.