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Minutes, Meeting of September 17, 1997
1. Budget Update. Sarah Thomas discussed some of the library goals and fund raising priorities for 1997-98, on the basis of documents that she prepared for Provost Randel. Some of the priorities include Collection Development, Preservation, and the Digital Library. Sarah has requested a 8-10% increase every year until 2002, or a $15 million endowment. Electronic publishing is changing the pattern in scholarly communication and thought needs to be given to how best to meet the demands of scholars. Sarah requested a $4 million base and a $4.5 million one-time allocation for the acquisition of electronic resources, conversion of current holdings to digital form, E-reserves, digital archives, capital equipment, facilities, staff, and the new LMS. The request for the LMS alone comes up to $2.76 million (hardware and software, workstations, data conversion, etc.). This budget does not reflect expectations, but does demonstrate the extent of library needs.
2. LMS Update. Eight vendors have submitted proposals. The proposals will be broken down by subsets and evaluated by the evaluation teams. Vendors will be invited in November-early December. The final decision on funding will be made in December.. The vendors are: Ameritech, DRA, SGI, Ex Libris, Gaylord, EOS, VTLS and Endeavor. Notably missing are SIRSI and GEAC.
3. LTD Priorities. No big investment into Notis will be undertaken at this point, but the upgrade to 6.4 is still scheduled for Early 1998.
4. Overall Library Budget. The library budget has to be considered in the context of the university budget cuts, caused by a loss of federal funds, a lower tuition increase, the cost of absorbing the work of the Theory Center, and the fewer number of graduate students, among other factors. The library needs to justify its needs compelling to have no cut or a lesser share of cuts. Both President Rawlings and Provost Randel are strong supporters of the library.
5. Fund Raising. One way to compensate for the loss of funds and to engage in new activities is to get outside funds. At a September 11 meeting, a group of library managers discussed strategies to seek and obtain grants and endowment funds. Peter McDonald articulated the focus of his working group which has produced a web site at: http://www.nysaes.cornell.edu/library/draft.html. Grant proposals will go to Ed Weissman and requests for external funds and foundations will go to Vally Kovary. They will then be reviewed by Sarah Thomas. Impacted people will sign off on them.
The Library Administration will soon announce a $25,000 internal library grant competition to get grants of up to $5000 this year, and possibly over the following two years. More information will be forthcoming.
Wither the Council of Librarians? There was a short discussion about the future of the Council of Librarians. Sarah Thomas will take the comments into consideration before deciding how best to promote good communication within the library.
Recorder: Claire M. Germain
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rev. 12/19/97 dih