Budget. CUL has a total materials budget from all sources (including Medical) of ca. $14.5 million. Approximately $2.5 million of this is from endowment revenues, and a small amount is from one-time funding--but most of it consists of appropriated funding from the University or the State. Because of the decentralized nature of Cornell, only about two-thirds of the materials budget is centrally managed--but that does include materials budgets of all IRIS libraries. The materials funding we have available is inadequate to meet the broad needs of current and future Cornell students and scholars. The University is providing only a 3% increase in the budget for next year. Because we anticipate price increases which will be several times that amount, we will be undertaking significant cancellations and other cut-backs in the fall.
Balancing Paper and Electronic. We now spend ca. 15% of our materials budget on electronic resources, and selectors have been asked to give priority to electronic resources in their selection decisions. The greatest pressure on the budget is to create a full and useful digital library, while at the same time maintaining our collections of traditional materials, upon which many of our users continue to rely heavily. One key difficulty is the uneven publishing of digital materials in different subject areas: while we take some funding for digital materials “off the top,” i.e., from all budget lines, we necessarily use that funding, therefore, to support some subjects more than others. I expect this to even out in the next few years, but in the meantime, there is some concern about service equity.
Processing. We are now in a situation in which we are purchasing more materials than we can effectively process--despite many innovative short-cuts and economies made by technical services. We need to gather more information on the reason for this, and then develop methods in collection development and technical services to redress this imbalance.
Subject Specialists. It is essential that we recruit and nurture collection development staff who have knowledge of the scholarship and the languages of their subject areas. This works best if we bring into the Library staff with strong subject backgrounds--although experienced selectors can also gain that knowledge on the job, provided that the Library is willing to give them the time and assistance to do so. Such skills are essential not only for building the best possible collections but also--equally importantly--for relating to and working with faculty and graduate students.
Dividing Selection with Other Responsibilities. Selection can be lonely work, and selectors can get isolated--especially if they do not make a conscious effort to work closely with other functional staff. One method to allay such isolation is to make selection one responsibility of several--so that selectors also catalog, provide standard reference services, or manage other operations. When selection is combined with other functional responsibilities, however, it is sometimes seriously neglected, because other operations may appear more pressing. Part time selectors need to be trained, therefore, to set aside regular time for selection, and their supervisors must be willing to support their selection work.
Faculty Liaison. Maintaining regular and ongoing relations with faculty (and also with graduate students) is a key job responsibility of all selectors. The greater and more rapid the changes in library services and policies, the more essential it is that selectors maintain such regular links with faculty. At the present time, the connections between selectors and faculty are somewhat uneven. Some selectors make this a priority, while others, I sense, probably spend less time keeping faculty informed and seeking faculty input. We need therefore to mount a campaign to create more regular connections with faculty. We will use the planning to undertake cancellations and other adjustments for 2002/03 (see “Budget” above) as an opportunity to do this.
Centralized Distribution of Selection Resources. The Library system receives through the mail large quantities of paper advertisements, bibliographies and other information on the available of new (and used) publications. Much of this information is unnecessary, since we will know about such publications from other, more standard resources, or we will receive those publications on approval or on blankets. On the other hand, some of these paper notifications are essential, because they are the sole source of information on particular publications. It is very important to the functioning of collection development, therefore, that we have knowledgeable clerical staff who have the understanding and authority to discard those paper notifications that are not needed, and forward those sources that are needed to the appropriate selectors.
Approval Plans. We have over the years gradually increased our approval plans, and we expect to continue this--in order to save selection and processing time. As always in such cases, we need to be careful not to jeopardize the distinctiveness of our collections by such outsourcing. While we certainly can and should use approval plans and blankets to bring in standard sources and core materials, the decisions on more specialized materials need to be made in-house by subject specialists who are well acquainted with local user needs and collection strengths.
The Completeness Syndrome. Users rely upon the Library to ensure that those resources which are most needed will be readily accessible. As was the case in cataloging, however, there is a growing sense in the air that the cost of building a well balanced and complete collection may be greater than the value of that collection to the user. Speaking hypothetically, it may take me, e.g., one thousand hours to locate and select 98% of the relevant materials currently published on a particular subject--but it might take an additional five hundred hours to identify the final 2%. Finding and making accessible that last 2% used to be what research library collection building was all about, but that value is changing. In some cases, the best possible collection within the confines of available resources may increasingly include some gaps, because the cost of filling those gaps may exceed the value of doing so. This is one example of the reason we need to review the definition of excellence in collection building in the new environment.
Uris Collection. Uris Library, located a hundred yards from the main library (Olin), served for many years as an undergraduate library, which has included the building of a duplicate collection of ca. 150,000 volumes. Uris is still a very high-use collection, because of its easy access--but we have concluded after much thought that such a segregated undergraduate collection is neither effective nor needed. We will need to decide in the near future, therefore, on the most effective means to integrate the Olin and Uris collections.
Media. CUL had for many years a print bias, which slowed substantially our acquisition of non-print media. We feel now that we are significantly behind other research institutions in this area, and that we will need to identify resources to increase access to media as such access becomes ever more important in the new environment. The Library will also need to provide the necessary technology to make such resources accessible and useful.
NERL. CUL is an active member in the Northeast Research Library Consortium, through which we have purchased access to many of our larger databases and e-journal services. It often takes some time for NERL to make up its mind on a purchase, but the price savings have been worth it. CUL is also a member of the State purchasing consortium, and we expect we will need to make more decisions in future as to whether we continue to participate with NERL or whether we need to shift more of our cooperative efforts to NY State.
Ross Atkinson
6/4/02