Collection Development During the Downturn: Lessons from Cornell and Others
By Norman Oder Jul 15, 2010"If you are not buying more information per dollar spent, you're going to lose," observed Tom Sanville, Director of Licensing & Strategic Partnerships, LYRASIS, and formerly the head of the OhioLINK consortium, at Negotiating the Downturn: Collection Development for Tough Times, a panel discussion held June 27 during the American Library Association Annual Conference in Washington.
Collections librarians have to be doing that, because, as they explained, they have a lot less to work with. The strategies are many, including closing some libraries, changing work flows, exploring more partnerships, and working with faculty members to set priorities.
It's clearly a balancing act. Indeed, as Cornell University prepares for its 150th anniversary in 2015, it expects to reduce the number of libraries on campus. However, according to a slide prepared by John Saylor, Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources and Special Collections, "we will transform our remaining physical presence into popular destinations for productivity, learning, research and contemplation while we deploy our services and resources into virtual environments inhabited by students, faculty, and researchers."
That also involves reallocating "library personnel into critical new areas and [using] our subject and technical expertise to engage more effectively with faculty and other campus partners."
Behind Cornell
As Saylor explained, Cornell University Library receives collection development funds from six sources, including a general allocation (54%), and unrestricted gifts/endowments (10%), which Saylor directs to 40 selectors.
In FY 09-10, Cornell faced its first-ever materials budget reduction, a 5.3% cut in the general purpose allocation compounded by a 15% reduction in endowment payout. Retirement incentives meant three selectors left, and their positions were not refilled.
Thus the collections budget was cut about 8% across the board, with an elimination of monograph series, and the transformation of the Physical Sciences Library (Chemistry, Physics, and Astronomy) into a virtual library, among other changes.
For FY 11, the library's general allocation is cut 4.1%; while the collections budget is not suffering from that cut, a 13.7% reduction in endowment payout means a 2.6% budget reduction. Attrition is helping, but the full picture on cuts was not expected to emerge until the middle of this month.
Collective support
Among bright spots, Saylor said, is gaining significant support from the scholarly community for arXiv, which provides open access to 615,401 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics.
Also, Project Euclid, a joint CUL/Duke University Press partnership in theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics, is in the black, with 2010 subscription sales more than $30,000 ahead of projections.
And Cornell's arrangement with Amazon.com for print-on-demand service generated a $26,000 profit for in the first three months of this year. Among 3,800 PODs, Cornell sold 60 copies (@ $8.99) of Paul Jennings' A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison, a 24-page book published in 1865. "We don't expect that to last forever," Saylor observed.
A book sale to Tsinghua University in China raised money for other purchases, and Cornell has relationships with other growing Chinese universities.
Going forward
Saylor described a multi-pronged series of directives for the library, among them a plan to enhance resources devoted to collections and other scholarly resources, given that Cornell's acquisition budget has dropped from eighth to 13th in six years among members of the Association of Research Libraries. That involves ramping up fundraising, reallocating resources, and continuing to pursue collective collections.
More consolidation of unit libraries is on the way. For example, the collections and services of the Entomology Library will be consolidated into the Mann Library within two years, after a significant portion of the material is digitized. The print collection of the Engineering Library will be consolidated into other libraries, but the library still needs a funding boost to acquire more electronic resources.
Collaboration
Also, it's time to share more. Beyond enhancing Borrow Direct (involving nearly all Ivy League schools), Cornell has embarked on a partnership with Columbia known as 2CUL.
Saylor said the libraries were close to an agreement to share a Slavic Studies Selector and were moving forward on South Asian studies and co-purchasing of back files. One audience member asked how that agreement would work. He said a draft Memorandum of Underestanding was in process. "I think the most crucial thing was getting to know the selector," he said, and having that person come to Cornell for a two-day visit.
The library also is working work with Cornell Information Technologies to develop a plan for academic computing, involving a single vendor for various devices, and standardizing business process to buy rather than build most applications.
At Harvard
Dan Hazen, Associate Librarian of Harvard College for Collection Development, Harvard College Library, suggested that Harvard was "a sufficiently idiosyncratic aka weird place" that it may not be an example.
The library budget and staff have suffered significantly—about 100 staffers have either retired or been laid off. Still, over the past four or five years, "thanks to a fairly militant faculty, collections were protected," he said, also citing special allocations or foundation funds.
With the payout on the endowment expected to go down by another 12%, Harvard is not expecting further relief, however, he said.
Looking more broadly, Hazen suggested that the primacy in collections Harvard once earned is faces a "kind of existential threat or challenge" from Google and the notion that collections are "out there in the cloud."
He said Harvard was trying to develop a model to prioritize decisions for collections spending. Acknowledging oversimplification, he described a four-tiered structure, involving core literature; the record of scholarship, which may not be comprehensive; primary sources (newspapers, journals, gray literature, blogs, sound recordings, etc.—"you can't [wrap] your mind around it"); and raw data, "beyond the capacity of any single institution, necessarily a collective enterprise."
Harvard, which has been an outlier among Ivy League schools in not participating in Borrow Direct, is taking another look, he said.
At Oregon State
Faye Chadwell, Associate University Librarian for Collections and Content Management, Oregon State University, brought a somewhat different perspective. After all, she said, "Higher ed has been on a downturn since I moved to Oregon in 1995."
So the library's collections budget has faced multiple crunches, with $464,000 worth of serials canceled in 2009, $1.1 million in 2010, and $208,000 anticipated in 2011. Monographs are bought with gift funds, and the library had to turn off its approval plan for more than half the year in 2008 and 2009.
After creating an allocation formula for monographs, "no matter how they tweaked the numbers, we couldn't get away from the fact that there would be a tremendous impact on social sciences and humanities," she said. So that formula will be applied only to 30% of an allocation, with the other 70% be based on historical spending patterns.
Oregon State is working with the University of Oregon to share expertise and working with both the latter and Portland State University on consortial purchases.
