Week in Review
November 4, 2013
Good morning,
As I mentioned in my last Week in Review, last week included a drive to Frankfort to deliver a letter - along with Terry Birdwhistell from UK and Arne Almquist from NKU - to Al Lind, the VP of Technology at CPE regarding a timeline for replacing Voyager. The letter requests KYVL to negotiate a state-level contract for Alma/Primo for all of SAALCK and the KCTCS libraries, and that they do so by April. Should they not provide evidence of moving towards that goal, it is quite likely that the SAALCK and KCTCS institutions will withdraw from the Voyager consortium and seek a replacement for Voyager independently. This issue is being brought up to the Council of Provosts this week at their monthly meeting, hopefully leading to yet more pressure placed on CPE to finish a project which has lingered for far too long.
The constant increase in inflationary costs to our journal and database subscriptions is a problem each year, often leading us to cut other portions of the Acquisitions budget and to eliminate subscriptions to stay within budget. In this case, a flat budget is essentially a cut budget. The cost of journal/database subscriptions goes up by 6-8% annually, compared with the Consumer Price Index's "normal" inflationary growth of 1-2% annually. To help address this issue, I've been working with Jay Morgan and Jackie Dudley to get fairly regular inflationary increases built into the university budget. The solution that we have reached is for the Libraries to have greater access to the Library Technology Fee, which has been restricted in the past to capital technology purchases (i.e., replacing the computer lab). I'm hopeful we will find a way to do this, and start reducing the impact of inflation growth on the ACQ budget. Getting such a procedure into place does not change the need for us to make data-driven decisions about subscriptions, electronic access, and demand-driven acquisition models.
Have a good week everyone.
Best,
Adam