May 23, 2003
Dear Faculty, Deans, Directors, and Chairs,
You have recently received information from Betsy Wilson, Director, University Libraries, regarding the University Libraries budget. I am writing to provide more detailed information regarding the Health Sciences Libraries budget situation in response to numerous requests from Health Sciences faculty, staff and administrators.
Our resources budget pays for the books, journals and online resources that are critical for our faculty, students and staff to learn, teach, do research and deliver care. Unfortunately, budget cuts, inflation and the digital transition continue to take a toll on our ability to maintain a first class research collection. We are currently facing a 5% budget cut as well as predicted serials inflationary costs of between 10-12% for the coming year. This will cripple our ability to maintain even our current collection of journals, books and databases.
Over the past decade, much has changed in the economy as well as in research and teaching needs for new types of resources (e.g. in molecular biology), new journals and entirely new areas of research. It is important to note that during the past ten years, while the economy flourished and the UW received ever increasing research dollars, as a result of pressures on the state budget we have had to cancel journal titles and databases and greatly reduce book purchases in order to accommodate the following:
- average of 10% inflationary increases for each of the last ten years
- proliferation of online resources including serials, databases and software tools needed by faculty, staff and students
- actual budget cuts in recent years
As a consequence, our current journal collection stands at about 2000 titles. To put the situation starkly: we now have about 1000 fewer unique journal titles at HSL than we had in 1988 when I arrived at the University of Washington as Director. We clearly no longer have a research collection to support biomedical research.
In response to these challenges our approach has been to: 1) focus on increasing access to electronic resources and 2) allocate a major proportion of our collections budget to journals. This is in direct response to our users requests both directly and through surveys which the Libraries as well as HSL have conducted over the past few years.
We are doing our best to maintain and, indeed, extend our services and collections in support of the superb scientific research, teaching and clinical care for which our institution is known. We appreciate your support during these difficult times and will be in touch as we know more regarding our situation. As always we will provide links with updated information and requests for input regarding potential serials cuts on the Healthlinks homepage (Healthlinks.washington.edu).
Sincerely,
Sherrilynne Fuller, Ph.D.
Director
Health Sciences Libraries
http://healthlinks.washington.edu/hsl/hslbudgetletter2003.html