The link is here, courtesy of an anonymous correspondent. Duck athletics used to contribute $50K a year to the library. With football revenue increasing so quickly it’s getting hard to spend it all on coach’s salaries, now seems like a good time for Library Dean Adriene Lim to hit up Athletic Director Rob Mullens, and ask him to restart that tradition with some serious money – serious by Library standards that is. Rounding error to the Ducks:
Library Collections News – Updated 4/28/16
Spring 2016: Library to Reduce Spending on Collections
Collection Reduction: On April 6, 2016, a memo went out from the Dean of Libraries, Adriene Lim, to the campus community announcing the need for reductions to library collections in FY 17. These reductions stem from a $115,000 cut to the collections budget as a result of the UO’s current budget realignment process, compounded by a reduction of $450,000 due to the lack of increases to cover inflationary costs. During the month of May, library subject specialists will work with UO faculty to develop reduction plans to offset the campus-mandated cuts as well as the erosive effects of Inflation on library materials. The reduction targets for each discipline have been finalized (see below). If you have questions or concerns, please contact the appropriate subject specialist. As always, the UO Libraries will continue to provide robust resource sharing services to help supplement local holdings in order to meet the research and instruction needs of faculty and students.
Reduction Targets to cover inflation in FY 17: Fixed costs were subtracted from the allocations for each discipline (i.e., a dollar amount representing actual expenditures) producing an across the board reduction of 12.4% on all funds over $3,000 (funds under $3K are being protected from the cut).
So “realignment” is just the new marketing word for “cuts”? I thought we were trying to grow as a university. Growing through cuts?
I thought of this listening to Schill speak a couple of weeks ago. I found him otherwise compelling, but was perplexed as he talked about infrastructure and didn’t mention the recent memo we’d all received about library cuts (And this is not the first round of such cuts, just the latest.) How is the library not a fundamental part of UO’s research infrastructure?
Drop all the Elsevier subscriptions and put the money into a fund to pay people’s open access publishing fees. Win-win, we can pirate the Elsevier stuff anyway: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone
As the descendant of the Revolutionary War privateer Silas Talbot I’ve got no qualms about seizing the property of tyrants, but I wonder about the legality of this situation. I’ve got a request in to General Counsel Kevin Reed, asking if his office would be willing to provide UO researchers wanting to use sci-hub with letter of marque.
Something to the effect of “The University of Oregon and its Senate grants _________ License and Authority to attack, subdue, and take any journal articles belonging to the present tyrannical owners of monopolistic publishing companies, including Elsevier, and to use said articles on any computer, or in a research paper or grant proposal, as a lawful Prize.”
I’ll post more soon.
The library system was already understaffed and underfunded. Staff have already “reinvented” themselves and their processes numerous times since the turn of the 21st century, but there comes a point when you can’t do more with less, you really only can do less with less. Why hire 80 new faculty if you are not going to give the library funding to support their research *as well as* the research of faculty already here. The library is a core service, the heart of any university, and it’s being treated as though maybe it too is a less-trendy department without enough student enrollment. Anyone walking through Knight from noon onward can see it gets plenty of use. Students and faculty are consulting all sorts of materials, not just the internet. It’s time for the upper administration to re-think any more cuts to library funding, and to restore some of what was cut.
I trust the AAU is paying attention.
I guess this is how they pay for the cluster hires.
The UO has been on the low end, if not at the bottom, of most every AAU metric related to graduate students, research and the like. Compared to AAU research universities the UO has been increasingly woeful – yet we remain in the AAU. This is not new – we have been on this brink for at least a decade – they may be paying attention and shrugging – much like UO admin,
On the cluster hires, can HUB or UOM or someone else, document the progress, the failures, etc of this process. From my involvement in the cluster hires, well, things could be going better in terms of the kind of offer and facilities we have for really catalytic people – I am not sure the process cares about this …
It will be interesting to see if Conover, the next VPRI, has any influence on this.