-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Academic Library Budgets -- Judith Stokes Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2001 17:35:03 -0400 From: Albert Henderson <chessNIC@compuserve.com> on Fri, 1 Jun 2001 "Stokes, Judith" <JStokes@ric.edu> wrote: > As many times as I have read on SERIALST that library budgets > as a percentage of university budgets has declined in recent > decades, I don't recall where to look for supporting figures. > I now have a faculty member who is actually interested! The > question is where my institution stands compared to national > figures on size of library budget as a percentage of > university budget over the last 25 years or so. Can someone > point me to national figures? Not long ago, the ACRL Standards for college libraries called for library's annual authorized expenditures to be at least 6% of the total institutional expenditure for educational and general purposes. [College & Research Libraries News. 56 (April, 1995) 245-57.] I couldn't tell you what sort of politics drummed this parameter out of the standards published in 2000. The figures you are looking for may be in _University Libraries and Scholarly Communication_ [Washington DC: Association of Research Libraries. "1992" p. 33, 36] Total library expenditures as a percentage of total educational and general expenditures. 1979 and 1990, are provided for twenty-four universities chosen as typical, showing the average fall from 3.95% in 1979 to 3.2% in 1990, an average decline of 19%. Of particular note is the 2.93 percent figure given for Columbia University in 1990. Thirty years before, Jacques Barzun claimed that six percent of spending went to libraries in universities like Columbia. [The American University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. 2d ed. with a new introduction. 1993. p. 174, 196] In the Dec. 12, 1997, issue of Chronicle of Higher Educuation, professor James Shapiro, wrote, "I'm embarrassed to report that my own university, Columbia, with one of the largest collections in the country, ranked far lower [than Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, and Chicago - 'libraries that are still a pleasure to use'], spending a meager 2.55 per cent, or $28 million, on its libraries" [University libraries: the 7-per-cent solution. Chronicle of Higher Education, XLIV(16), B4-5] The literature of declining fortunes goes back to the 1970s. - 1975 - Bernard M Fry and Herbert S White observed that library budgets failed to rise at the same rate as their host institutions, that declining percentages of libraries' budgets were allocated to collection development, and that libraries were not keeping up with the expansion of publications. He noted that pPublishers have been discouraged from underwriting research publications. [Economics and Interaction of the Publisher-Library Relationship in the Production and Use of Scholarly and Research Journals. [Washington DC: National Science Foundation. Reprinted as Publishers and Libraries: A Study of Scholarly and Research Journals. Lexington MA: DC Heath, 1976] - 1979 - The National Enquiry into Scholarly Communication. 1979. Scholarly Communication. The Report. [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1979] Reporting a 3-year study sponsored by American Council of Learned Societies, the panel opined that inadequate collections were the most serious problem facing scholars. - 1984 - U. Mass librarian Richard Talbot observed, "Academic libraries have fallen on hard times, in part because the percentage of the budget they receive has been effectively frozen or has declined. From 1967 to 1977, academic libraries were continually losing ground, with declines in library expenditures per student, number of staff per student, proportion of the library budget expended for materials, and the number of books added to collections. This downward trend has probably continued to the present. Despite the pressures of inflation, the pattern of library budgetary allocation for salaries, materials, and "other" remains unaffected. Most remarkable has been the shift in expenditures for books and serials. The "library cost disease," now in remission, will flare up anew as computer software costs become the dominant element in library automation costs. The success of librarians in the scholarly communication process will determine the degree to which they will receive funding." >>From highlights. [Lean years and fat years: lessons to be learned. College and research libraries. Bowker Annual. 74-82] Talbot refers to statistics published by the Departement of Education. - 1991 - Library spending dropped $110 million in FY1986-87 from the year before. It is the only figure to drop from the prior year! As a share of total current-fund expenditures, library spending dropped from 2.6 to 2.3 percent. Unspent revenues climbed $144.396 million in FY 1986-87 from the year before. [U.S. Dept. of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. 1991. Digest of Education Statistics 1991. NCES 91-697. Tables 302 and 311] - 1992 - In an analysis of ARL statistics, Ann Okerson and Kendon Stubbs wrote, "If the curve were extended even further, by 2007 ARL libraries would stop buying books entirely, and only purchase serials; by 2017 they would buy nothing, and instead access everything." [Publishers Weekly. 239,34 (July 27, 1992) p. 22-23] - 1998 - The dropping percentage of total (E and G) expenditures received for total library operating expenditures for public and private institutions by Carnegie Classification: 1992 and percent change from 1990 appears in Table 6. Notes refer to research indicating that six percent spending optimizes effectiveness. [U.S. Dept. of Education. National Center for Education Statistics. 1997. Status of Academic Libraries in the United States. Results from the 1990 and 1992 Academic Library Surveys. NCES 97-413. p. 19-20. Table 6] - 1999 - Because [a] sponsored research demands more advanced collections than other institutions and [b] sponsored research generates journal articles, I compared spending at a set of ARL libraries with sponsored R&D between 1960 and 1995. The figures clearly show that the growth of library spending kept pace with R&D until 1970. After that, library spending fell to half the rate of growth of R&D and the worldwide generation of journal articles. [Information science and information policy. The use of constant dollars and other indicators to manage research investments. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 50,4:366-379] Finally, based on figures published by the National Center for Education Statistics, I charted the growth of profitability - unspent revenues - in higher education. It approximates the decline of library share of spending. Profitability takes what libraries give up. The chart appears as an appendix to the online version of my editorial in Science. [Information Science vs. Science Policy. (guest editorial) Science. 289:243 July 14, 2000. <http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/289/5477/243>] The data for nearly all these analyses is widely published, so anyone can easily verify the trends. Best wishes, Albert Henderson Former Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY 1994-2000 <70244.1532@compuserve.com> . . . .
