FY05 Operational Plan
By the Budget Group

In an e-mail of 24 February, 2004, Paula alerted the faculty to the budget outlook for the next three to five years. In that e-mail she said that “Instead of dealing with a reactive annual strategy that leaves everyone uncertain about available resources until nearly the start of the fiscal year, we intend to develop a longer-term plan that will create more stability and predictability.” This document explains why the Budget Group endorses that position and also lays out a plan for the future based on suggestions from Library faculty and staff. The alternative is to continue to whittle away at our excellence until it becomes mediocrity. The Budget Group’s plan represents a choice to pursue excellence.

The Current Budget Situation

Funding for higher education in the State of Illinois has had its ups and downs over the last three decades. Typically, the cyclical pattern of down years followed by recovery and increases led many of us in higher education to expect that good budget years will follow bad. Since 2001, however, fundamental changes have occurred, and the cyclical pattern of recession/recovery appears to have ceased. Good budget years are not following bad, but worse years are following the bad ones. In each of the past three fiscal years, the University has received a smaller state allocation than in the previous year and tuition has increased only very modestly. Two years ago, in FY 2003, there were no pay raises for faculty. In FY 2004 there were pay raises for faculty and civil service staff, but the Library’s budget was cut by 3.84%, and in addition we experienced a 9% ($1,000,000) loss of purchasing power in our collections budget.

What has changed?

In the past, the bad funding years were the result of bad economic conditions. This economic reality has certainly played an important role in the current situation, but now additional factors also are affecting the Budget Group’s expectations for the future.

Negative Financial factors

There has been a multi-year, documented negative attitude towards spending on higher education in the state of Illinois and throughout the country, and a concomitant suspicion by state officials that appropriated funds are not being spent wisely, that professors are not accountable, and that administrative costs are bloated negligently. The governor again has projected a decrease in funding for higher education in the state, contrary to the recommendations of the Illinois Board of Higher Education, and IBHE itself is questioning what appear to be low faculty workloads.

1. The purchasing power of the collections budget continues to decline. This has occurred because of the inflation of serial and monograph prices, the increase in the number of available (and expensive) electronic resources, the decline of the US dollar in relation to foreign currencies, and the failure of the state to provide materials price increase money for the last several years. Put simply, even the same amount of money buys less each year.
2. To support current and future use of the print collections, we must house and preserve them responsibly. We are at or over the shelving capacity of most of our libraries. The Oak Street Facility, designed to relieve this situation, was funded in large part by the campus, not by the state, in response to the Library’s oft-stated needs and after it became clear that the previously proposed final stacks addition would not be funded. The campus has invested $2.8 million for construction costs, in addition to land acquisition and utility pole relocation (itself a $250,000 line item). But this did not come without any obligation on the part of the Library. In order to build a first module large enough to accommodate current needs, we had to take out a $1,000,000, interest-free loan, repayable over five years (at $200,000 per year) from the campus. We also had to allocate funds ($400,000) for shelving and the cherry picker lift needed in the building. There are also ongoing demands for supplies, equipment, and personnel. Because of the long lead time necessary to finance, design, and build each module, the Library must soon approach the Provost again for funding for the next module of the Oak Street Facility, even though we would not begin to transfer materials to the second module until approximately 2008.
3. Services to patrons in libraries in general, and to patrons in this Library in particular, are undergoing tremendous changes. Patron demands and expectations for traditional and new services are increasingly rapidly. For example, the number of freshman in the Fall of 2003 was the highest it has ever been; interlibrary loan traffic continues to rise, and new forms of reference service, both e-mail and chat reference, are now expected by our patrons. The rise in the number of electronic full-text journals has been perhaps the most visible driving force in rising expectations. Not only do our users want these electronic journals, but also expect supporting services, such as real-time troubleshooting, instruction, and expert advice in choice of the appropriate access tools. It is also clear that the Library faculty have an obligation to support and advance learning, inquiry, and research through a variety of means, including our collection development efforts and our new information literacy initiative. Today’s information landscape offers many choices; if we do not provide what UIUC students and faculty need, they will go elsewhere to meet their goals and we will become increasingly less important to the University.
4. The Library has a deteriorating physical plant. To be sure, major projects are taken care of by the University, especially after a situation has reached crisis proportions (witness the recent commitment for roofing, gutters, and a sprinkler system for the Undergraduate Library and the Main Stacks). But, there are constant demands, not only for minor remodeling, but for repairs and other facilities related expenditures that the Library must meet through spending from our own operations budget.
5. The pace of technological change very quickly makes the current networking infrastructure obsolete or at best inadequate. In addition, the 800 or so computer workstations in the Library have a life expectancy of only four to five years, requireing expenditures of about $250,000 per year just to replace them. The personnel that service our networks and machines, the software that we must license, and other expenditures that are part and parcel of the information technology world in which we work and live require additional investments to provide baseline support.
6. User surveys over the past five years, many national studies, and personal experiences among Library faculty have clearly indicated that many users want digital collections, not only full-text, online, all-the-time, but also research materials that have just begun to be digitized, such as maps, aerial photographs, and other special collections. That is, users are interested in new e-content that we purchase, e-content from print that we or others digitize, and by extension in the development of new technology applications that advance access to content in all formats. Funds for some of this content and the technological development have in the past ten years come from grants obtained by several of our faculty members. While we can assume that grants will continue to be a resource for future cutting-edge development, there are costs (personnel, equipment, etc.) that are necessary to integrate proven digital developments into everyday library services. These demands do not undermine the use and importance of our print collections; in fact they enhance their use and importance and we must find the means to meet them.
7. Salaries are too low and, among many groups of staff, too compressed. Anticipated increases in the minimum wage and through negotiated contracts, including the GEO, will put additional pressures on our available salary dollars (e.g. an additional $85,000 for student workers as a result of the minimum wage increase; an additional $21,000 for GAs’ medical insurance). More importantly, low and compressed salaries have serious negative effects on morale and motivation.
8. With the loss in this fiscal year of approximately 75 FTE positions (25 FTE civil service positions, 6 FTE graduate assistants, and 44 FTE student workers) and approximately six vacant faculty positions, we have been forced to cut hours, delay service responses, and cut back on instruction. This situation has only been partly offset by the infusion of $125,000 of non-recurring money for student assistants, the majority of which was designated by the Provost to increase hours. To balance vacancies throughout the Library, we reassigned staff, a practice that was as disruptive and dispiriting as it was necessary.
9. The migration to the Voyager serials module will be a detailed and labor intensive process. The most optimistic estimate is that it will take two to three years. Until it is completed we must continue to pay for two serials systems (III and Voyager). The III machine and software have limited expected lives.
10. Perhaps the most important pressure we face is the lower morale and higher stress levels that are currently endured by all Library employees. While “intangible” in accounting terms, this stress has a direct impact on service provision. The current circumstances undermine our ability to feel good about doing good work and lead us to mistrust and second-guess each other. In any plan that we devise, we have to keep in mind the long-term implications of this type of stressful environment and try to eliminate it, or alleviate it as much as possible. At the same time, morale and organizational climate cannot be mandated administratively and so we must all be attentive to the impact our own stresses place on colleagues and patrons.

Revenue Sources

 For this budget year (2003-2004), we spent approximately $11 million on collections, $16 million on personnel, and $2 million on operations and facilities.

On the revenue side, we have a limited, but fairly predictable, number of revenue sources.

• From the state/campus we currently receive approximately $29,500,000 per year.
• We receive ICR funds ($900,000) that we apply to general library operations (included above).
• The campus sometimes provides additional revenue, for example, money from the Provost for hours, or the major funding commitment from the Provost for the Oak Street Facility. Some academic departments share or bear the costs of some content to which we provide access.
• The Library Development and Public Affairs Office manages the gifts and bequests that we receive.
• Library Friends Annual Gifts: $394,000
• Unrestricted Gift Income from Endowments: $175,000
• Restricted Gift Income from Endowments: $1,100,000
• Funds from grants are applied to specialized projects. At the conclusion of FY03, grant account balances totaled $2,800,000.
• IRIS (Illinois Researcher Information Service) provides information on government and foundation grants and generates income through subscriptions to the service. IRIS generates a minimum of $50,000 a year in net revenues.
•  

The $30 million campus campaign for the Library will garner gifts that will allow us to address some of the financial pressures described above, but many of these funds will not be available for several years and so cannot be used immediately.

Now What?

Over the past two years the Library has approached its budget with the hope that it would get better next year. In doing so we have tinkered with the way operations are carried out, reassigned staff, thought about approaches through which we could consolidate certain operations (e.g. serials check-in or binding prep), implemented some cost-cutting measures (e.g., reduced travel, substituted phone cards for direct long-distance calls) and devised some innovative ways to raise additional revenues. Although these ideas for both revenue generation and cost reduction did, or will, result in additional monetary gains, the amounts involved do not begin to cover our actual needs.

We can no longer tinker. The proposals for change that have been advanced by the divisions and some individuals as well as the work underway by the Strategic Planning Committee have informed our work and form the basis of this plan to create a user-focused operational model that will not only raise our morale, but also be attainable within the new budget reality.

The Plan

Service Values are Our Foundation

Service values lie at the core of our mission and a concise, clearly articulated services vision must guide any changes we make to our service structure. We have developed our vision over the years. We are guided by the fundamental principle that our services must be user-centered. Our primary users are students and faculty and their main concerns are scholarship, teaching, and learning. Our energies must be focused on supporting and enhancing scholarship, teaching, and learning through careful stewardship and use of the resources we possess and to which we provide access. Our collections are not just there; they are there for our users. Our reference and instruction services are for our users and we actively reach out to them to ensure that they get the reference service and instruction they want and need.

To maximize service within our operational and budgetary constraints we must continue to maintain a common focus on our users’ information needs, and in so doing achieve a balance between service provision on the one hand and supporting the people who provide the service on the other. Fifty service points open up to 85 hours weekly with over-worked, exhausted, sometimes under-trained, and demoralized staff is a weak platform from which to provide good service. An exhausted, stressed staff, stretched thin over more service points than it can reasonably manage produces poor service. One centralized service point with idle staff also produces poor service. The question before us is how to optimally support scholarship, teaching, and learning with the staff we currently have, in a rapidly changing technological environment, in our current facilities, aware of the changing expectations of our users, without sending us all over the edge: The answer for this Library, we believe, is contained in the imaginations and resourcefulness of the Library faculty and staff. The first steps towards concretely answering this question lie in the description of concrete actions for both libraries outside the main library building and libraries within the main library building and the Undergraduate Library.

Organizational Goals

Excellent service demands effective use of people and space. This requires flexibility in our staffing assignments to cover areas of immediate and critical need. To predict where these areas of critical need are we must create a viable assessment program that enables us to forecast and understand trends in user behavior so that we may respond accordingly and evolve our services accordingly. To use space effectively we must transform it to support our efforts in realizing our service vision. The entire main library facility must become less opaque and intimidating to our users. All library spaces should be able to support teaching, learning and scholarship in small work groups, but be flexible enough to change as students’ learning behavior changes. We must improve the work flow and quality control of our technical processes to eliminate the redundancy that lack of trust in these processes engenders. We foresee an organization characterized by a consolidation of staff and a diffusion of expertise. We must provide library faculty with multiple opportunities to satisfy career paths, and most importantly free many of them from the often onerous managerial tasks that impede their working with faculty, developing and managing collections, and providing services to all users. Finally, we will create a supportive reward structure that does not privilege working with faculty and graduate students over working with undergraduates or working “behind the scenes.”

Most of the following steps have already been recommended in several divisional annual budget reports, various unit reports, and in subsequently written 25-year vision statements. For the most part the responsibility for implementing these actions will rest with those involved and affected. One point needs additional emphasis: there are no funds for additional staff, so when we indicate teams of personnel carrying out various tasks, this means that the teams will be formed from current staff.

Conclusion

We intend the steps outlined above to be the initial stage of transforming our library into the organization that we envision. Some of these suggestions may eventually be rejected or reformed through discussions, or through ongoing assessment, or be modified to meet exigent circumstances. Their virtue lies in moving forward, toward a more flexible, responsive, and humane organization that builds excellent collections for our users and provides excellent services to our users.

Printable Copy