Dr. Brooks Interview Transcribe (Library Beat Update)

Dr. Monica Garcia-Brooks Interview Transcribe:

“The bad news is that over the last five or six years we’ve had cuts, as I mentioned we have lost about 20 percent of our overall buying power, with combination of cuts and inflation. Because publishers have forced publisher inflation and we don’t get to negotiate with that because they have a monopoly on several of the titles. In fact that one publisher has the most significant lock on all the science, technology, engineering and medical journals in the world. The own something like 20 percent of everything that is published in the world. So if you are an engineer and you like the number one journal in your field because you’re teaching your students and you want them to have access to this information there’s only one publisher that we can get that journal from, and they can decide how much they want to charge us. It’s a little bit frustrating. (The publisher is Elsevier Publishing, a Dutch company.) The good news is that the university has been working on a whole new budget model, and the chief financial officer has been working with information technology to address the inflation issues for the library. So we are very hopeful that the inflation will be addressed for 2016 and beyond and the library will no longer have to make cuts because of journal inflation. We are excited about that.  We are probably over time going to recover what we have lost, but we can’t do it overnight because some of the materials are really expensive. But as new programs are created at the university, now there is the process of where some of the programs write into their budget. So if we start a new program that requires an expensive journal then the deans and chairs and program coordinators who are establishing that program work with us to make sure they get current pricing information, and they know long term what the projected cost will be and they can write it into the program. At the committee meeting we reported that we were working on these things, but we at the time did not have the concrete numbers and figures, so it is kind of a bummer we think. There were two areas in the Health and Sciences Library, which is under the medical school; they had two big packages of journals JAMA and portion of their STEM packages that they were scared that they would not be able to renew, and the next day we got word that they were able to. I would say the library is on an upswing because the new budget process will now address some critical needs; especially inflation and we are now involved in the establishment of programs creation and development. We write that and we base it on all the expenditures from the previous year, and each year the library vendor will help us aggregate all of our subscriptions, in this case its EBSCO, and they will provide a projection of what they think inflation will be for the upcoming year and that’s what we base our projected costs on. For this upcoming year we are projecting a six percent increase in inflation. And we EBSCO gives us a projection, it’s an average, so it’s possible some journals won’t increase at all, others might increase by 12 percent, and there will be some in the middle at around five or six percent. We have to balance all these things in determining the cuts.”