The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ (FASS) total library spending budget for 2014-2015 will be $431,509, Associate Dean of FASS Julia Wright said at Balancing the Books on Nov. 26. This is a $63,000 increase from the 2013-2014 FASS operating library budget, which was $367,000.
Of the $431,509, only $260,584 is FASS’ share of the libraries’ operating budget. The rest of the money comes from FASS endowments and a $60,000 carry-forward from underspent 2013-2014 funds.
FASS’ 2014-2015 operating library budget will only be significantly more because of the lack of funds spent in the past three years. FASS was underspent by around $182,000 in the 2013-2014, $151,000 in 2012-2013 and $35,000 in 2011-2012.
“There’s a culture at this university of moving money around,” Wright said.
In the past, the libraries haven’t carried over underspent funds from one year’s FASS budget to the next year’s.
Yet even with underspending, FASS’ budget has been cut by 36.5 percent since 2011. Wright said that the librarians are looking into the cause of this. She said it may have to do with journal inflation costs.
FASS has 15 programs within it. Therefore, 15 programs have 15 top journals. Other faculties tend to have less programs. Some faculties, such as computer science or medicine, only have one program, and therefore only one top journal.
Wright said that the costs to buy 15 top journals haven’t been reflected in past FASS library operating budgets.
“Corporations are looking at the higher education sector and saying, ‘They have lots of money, we want it,’” Wright said. “And because they’ve cornered the market on the major journals in our field, they’ve been scooping them up one by one over the last 20 years, we don’t have a whole lot of choice, and they know it.”
FASS’ journals are also relevant for decades, whereas scientific journals are usually only relevant for three to five years.
“We deal with history,” Wright said, “and so the stuff we did 50 years ago is part of our history, and then becomes an object of study.”
University libraries across the country are trying to create more space, which means that they’re starting to prefer electronic sources. But electronic sources are more expensive than print sources. At Dal, half of the libraries’ operating budget are spent on the Electronic Access Fund.
Wright also chairs the FASS’ library committee. She put together a new library committee this year, which includes the university librarian, the head of the Killam, the FASS library committee and a representative from the Dalhousie Arts and Social Sciences Society.
In the new committee’s terms of reference, Wright has included a part that says the committee must talk about the FASS’ operating library budget.
Wright also worked with interim head of the Killam library, Elaine MacInnis, to get many of the numbers she presented at the Balancing the Books discussion. MacInnis and Wright also have put into place monthly budget checks for specialist librarians to ensure that budgeting issues don’t occur unknowingly.
“One of the long-term solutions here is to get student representation at library council so students are right there finding out what’s going on as the decisions are being made,” Wright said, “instead of finding out when suddenly there’s an announcement over the PA system, saying, ‘The library’s closing. Get out.’”
The PA system incident Wright referred to is one that happened last year when students only found out that the Killam library had new hours once a PA announcement told them that they must leave.
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