June 2004 Council on the Libraries minutes
Council on the Libraries
June 9, 2004
Treasure Room, noon to 1:30 pm
Minutes of the Meeting (Provisional)
Present: Malcolm Brown, Kathy Cottingham (Chair), John Crane, Harold Frost, Teoby Gomez, Vernita Irvin, Douglas Irwin, John James, Cyndy Pawlek, Jeffrey Ruoff, Jeremy Rutter
Guests: Barbara DeFelice, Jim Fries, Martin Wybourne
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1. Approval of Minutes (Kathy Cottingham)
Minutes from April and May 2004 meetings were approved.
2. Update on Librarian search (Kathy Cottingham)
The Librarian search committee held preliminary interviews with a long short list of candidates in Boston last week.
A short-list will be developed and narrowed down to 4 candidates.
Interviews will be set up on campus in July and August.
3. Update on FY05 budget (John Crane)
The Library operates with four separate budgets funded by Arts & Sciences, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School, and Tuck School. Unlike FY04, which was characterized by budget reductions, FY05 represents level-funding with some targeted increases as follows:
Arts & Sciences: approximately 4.5% increase available for information resources.
Medical School: through additions to budget and reallocations, the serials budget for FY05 will increase by 15% from FY04
Thayer School: approximately a 4% increase available for information resources
Tuck School: information resources will be level-funded from FY04
In all cases, the compensation budgets will be increased by standard College inflators and other operating expenses will be level-funded.
Inflation for information resources is expected to be in the range of 10 – 15%, with the largest increases, as usual, in the scientific, technical and medical areas. The result of this inflation is that our libraries, with the exception of medical areas, will need to continue reducing the amount of information purchased. To offset this inevitable result, libraries have enhanced resource sharing systems (e.g. Borrow Direct introduced last year among the Ivies). No institution of higher education is able to keep up with such high rates of annual inflation for information resources.
John Crane then described a library budget analysis that was created in Fall 2003 for the College’s Council on Priorities, in which the Library’s overall FY04 Arts & Sciences budget was allocated by program. The Library has applied that same analysis to the FY05 budget, (copy attached). Of particular interest is the “Scholarly Content Access” program of the Library, which has variously been called the “collections budget” or “books & publication” or “information resources”. It is important to note that the Library’s “collections budget” no longer focuses on books alone, but rather on a whole range of scholarly content – including licensing and purchasing large amounts of digital information and the technology, software and staff needed to deliver that scholarly content to library users.
The suggestion was made that the Council on the Libraries meet next year with the Council on Priorities as work begins on developing priorities for the FY06 budget, with a particular eye on the various library program budgets including the Scholarly Content Access budget.
4. Scholarly Communications III (Barbara DeFelice, Jim Fries)
Dartmouth: local progress on these issues, looming issues we may want to take a stand on, developing methods for discussing these issues, etc.
Barbara DeFelice and Jim Fries organized and facilitated the last of 3 discussions on "Scholarly Communication: Threats, Problems and Opportunities". In this final session, they presented examples of actions taken by faculty to develop alternative modes of scholarly publishing, publishers to adapt to pressures brought to bear by scholars and librarians, and institutions to inform their faculties and administrations about scholarly communication issues. A general discussion about what might be done at Dartmouth followed. The powerpoint slides for this talk are linked to the Council on Libraries web site (see: Scholarly Communications Presentation)
5. Meeting adjourned