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Re: Academic Library Budgets -- Albert Henderson Stephen D. Clark 06 Jun 2001 14:59 UTC

-------- 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>

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