Campus Library Committee to Study Allocation Issues
How do you stretch a library budget to meet the informational needs of all the academic programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign? Do you base it on the number of students and faculty served by a department? Do you allocate more funds for a department in which the journals are more expensive than for a department served by less expensive journals? A new committee to be appointed by Provost Richard Herman will address these questions. Professor Alexander Scheeline will serve as chair of the new group, which will be known as the Library Allocation Steering Committee (LASC). The committee will be charged with the task of reviewing current needs for Library acquisitions and preservation activities. It will then recommend a policy for distributing acquisition funds among the various disciplines on campus. Professor Scheeline, an analytical chemist, has been a member of the University of Illinois faculty since 1981. Early in his career he served on the Chemistry Department's Library Committee. In 1997, he became a member of the Senate Faculty-Student Committee on the Library, and in 1999-2000 he served as its chairperson. Professor Scheeline is approaching his new assignment with an appreciation for the complex issues of budget allocation, which involve preparing annual budgets for each of the 42 departmental libraries. He states, “It is ironic that acquisitions policy, which is central to building a Library that serves its users' information needs, has languished for many years. It has been so long since current policy was established that no one quite knows how the distributions among disciplines were originally made.” He explains that the LASC will weigh the various factors, including those internal to the Library and those derived from campus policies and objectives, on which a budget should depend. The LASC is a part of a continuing series of developments that began when the Library suffered a severe budget crisis in 1997. In response to the crisis, a task force chaired by Dean Thomas M. Mengler, College of Law, spent a year examining the policy and budget issues faced by the Library in the 21st Century. In 1998, the task force issued a series of recommendations for the Library administration. One of these recommendations involved engaging the campus community as a full partner. The final report of the task force can be viewed at the following Internet address: www.provost.uiuc.edu/misc/taskforce.html. Professor Scheeline reports that his goal in chairing the LASC is to provide every faculty member and student with an opportunity to make suggestions for a new allocation model for Library budgeting. While the members of the committee have not yet been officially appointed, he is optimistic that the group will find creative ways to obtain the input that is needed for the budget project. “The structure of library funding is so critical to every discipline that the needs of everyone must be heard,” he says. Further, he adds that his involvement with LASC will allow him to demonstrate his appreciation for the many services that he has received from the Library. He emphasizes, “I can think of no other activity which can so broadly impact the quality of scholarship across campus, nor is there any better way to comprehensively learn about the declarative human knowledge base than to study the structure of the Library's collections. This is going to be fun!” |
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