As my term is ending shortly, it is an opportunity to reflect
on the changes that have occurred over
the past twelve years. Most significant is that
we have built on an already strong complement
of librarians and staff to form one of the
most dedicated and successful library teams
among the CARL libraries. This is exemplified
by the recognition they have received through
awards, appointments to national committees,
and requests for their participation in significant
library initiatives.

Second is the strength of the collection budget.
With the continuing support of the University
Administration, the collection budget has
grown to be one of the strongest among comparable
Canadian universities and this is reflected
in the Macleans' annual university report.
The Library has taken on a number of new
initiatives over the last twelve years, most
significantly the Student Learning Commons,
which is working with Library Liaison to contribute
to student success, and the Library at
Surrey. Our media collection has also been a
great success, with a coordinated and strong
acquisitions programme.

The Library has enthusiastically undertaken
a number of significant and important special
projects which have also brought funding to
the University and contributed to the University's
relationships and renown within BC, nationally
and internationally. These include the hosting of the BC Electronic Library Network, the Synergies CFI project, as well as the PKP and reSearcher software development.

Renovations to many Burnaby library building spaces have contributed to its improved ambience and functionality.

The Nov. 26, 2009 report I delivered to the Board of Governors demonstrated the quality effectiveness and efficiency of SFU Library Services
(http://hdl.handle.net/1892/10650).

Finally, being a librarian at a vibrant and innovative institution such as SFU, first as Head of Library Systems and then as University Librarian, has been a tremendous experience, one made more enjoyable because of our wonderful students, faculty and staff. Thanks all!

1. Collection budget 2009/10

The Library spends approximately $3million per year on monographs and $5 million on journals, 90% in US$. There has been significant benefit achieved through consortial negotiation and package purchases over the past ten years. No deficit has been carried forward from 08/09 thanks to university administration support.

The Library is facing a significant collection budget shortfall for 09/10. The reasons for the cut are complex: the decline in Canadian dollar,on average, from 1.09 in 07/08 to 1.16 anticipated in 09/10; an actual cut of $393k; and annual serials increases, usually around 6%, independent of the $$ fluctuation. Thus there is an estimated shortfall of $1.58 million. Furthermore, the Library has multiyear commitments of $1.4 million. We can anticipate further cuts in 2010/11.

Because of the lead time in journal cancellations, final decisions must be made by the end of July 2009, allowing till August 21 for review by all faculty and possible adjustments.

2. What's being done?

‘Principles’ for the cutback (below) have been reviewed by the Senate Library Committee and an Advisory Committee formed with representatives from each of the faculties as well as undergraduate and graduate students. Data such as cost per use are being gathered; the relative cost of cancelling certain ‘packages’ and buying individual titles and relying on Interlibrary Loan has been calculated; and spending within ‘general’ and discipline specific funds is being reviewed.

Because of the size of the cut and the complexity of the subscriptions, this process is extremely difficult and I want to thank the Collections Management staff and the liaison librarians for their dedicated efforts. A web page with detailed information will be available shortly, linked from the collections management page http://www.lib.sfu.ca/collections . Liaison librarians and your Library rep will be discussing specific plans with you in the near future.

Before any final decisions are made, there will be consultation with faculty departmental representatives and individual faculty.

3. The reductions.

In broad terms, there are three categories of materials:

• - 'general' collections, including multidisciplinary resources, reference, index/abstracts, newspapers, etc.
• - journal packages from specific publishers
• - 'departmental' discipline-specific serials and monographs

3a. Liaison librarians have reviewed the 'general' collections in some detail and identified approximately $336,384 which could be saved; these will be reviewed as part of the process.

3b. Journal packages from specific publishers

The journal packages from specific publishers were originally created by aggregating and reallocating expenditures used to purchase individual titles from that publisher; increases to those expenditures have for the most part been less than might have been expected, through the negotiating power of consortial agreements. The packages represent significant collections in all disciplines and have greatly expanded direct access to resources (as opposed to Interlibrary Loan delivery).

Detailed analyses of the usage of individual titles has been undertaken. Modelling of the cancellation of the journal packages and replacing them with subscriptions to the most used titles (100 uses per year) and providing interlibrary loans for the rest is available on the web site. In short, the savings would be very small if this approach were taken.

The other possibility might be to revert to the titles originally held in print form, but again, the savings would be limited if any. Further, a number of online titles which receive heavy usage were not subscribed to in print.

The liaison librarians and collections management strongly recommend that these journal packages should be maintained. This has been discussed at the Advisory Committee but no consensus has been reached as to what would be the best approach.

3c. The 'departmental' lines of the budget support purchases of monographs, journals and other materials which do not form part of the general or journal package collections. Initial savings (about 10% of approvals) have been achieved by moving to paperback preferred approval books (with ameliorating measures where required). This does not apply to materials purchased as a direct request.

The draft collection budget is modeled on a 20/25% reduction by department, based on last year's expenditures but taking into account mitigating circumstances (new programming etc.). Your liaison librarian and library rep will be reviewing the options with you. While every discipline is different, in many departments the decision will be to preserve serials subscriptions and reduce the monograph expenditures.

4. General comments.

In the broader picture, we are not alone. Large US University libraries are also hard hit because of the loss in endowment income – a far larger source of their collection funding than ours. The International Consortium of Library Consortia has issued a call to publishers to recognize the situation and ameliorate price increases (through cost-saving nationwide consortium CRKN etc.) Some minor effect has been detected (eg fourfold reduction from initially proposed annual increase in a recent consortial agreement and, just recently, announcements by the AMS and OECD that they will hold their prices fixed. Further, SPIE announced a 10% rollback in pricing 'as the result of a year-long study involving numerous librarians and researchers and supports the Society's commitment to enabling the broadest possible dissemination of information to the worldwide optics and photonics community.').

The Library continues to discuss possibilities with the University Administration for ameliorating this situation but everyone is hurting. We are also following up with University Advancement about possible fundraising opportunities. We are making every effort to be as equitable as possible in this difficult circumstance.

I realize that this situation is of concern to everyone, and would be happy to discuss it further with you.

Lynn Copeland, University Librarian and Dean of Library Services

email: copeland@sfu.ca phone (778)782-3265 fax: (778)782-3023

The Library spends approximately $3million per year on monographs and $5 million on serials, 90% in US$. There has been significant benefit achieved through consortial negotiation and package purchases over the past ten years. No deficit has been carried forward from 08/09.

The Library is facing a significant collection budget shortfall for 09/10. The reasons for the cut are complex: the decline in Canadian dollar from 1.09 to 1.23 (though it may be improving); an actual cut of $393k; and annual serials increases usually around 6% independent of the $$ fluctuation. Thus there is an estimated shortfall of $1.974 million. In addition the Library has multiyear commitments of $1.4 million, meaning a 30% cut to the rest of the budget (not just electronic journals although they're part).

Whats being done? We are monitoring the exchange rate and prebuying where it makes sense. 'Principles' for the cutback have been reviewed by the Senate Library Committee and a special Advisory Committee with representatives from each of the faculties as well as undergraduate and graduate students. Data such as usage per $ are being gathered; the relative cost of cancelling certain 'packages' and buying individual titles is being calculated; and 'general' and discipline specific journals are being reviewed for cancellation. Because of the size of the cut and the complexity of the subscriptions, this process is extremely difficult and I want to thank the Collections Management staff and the liaison librarians for their dedicated efforts. Before any final decisions are made, there will be consultation with faculty departmental representatives and individual faculty.

In the broader picture, we are not alone. Large US U. libraries also hard hit because of the loss in endowment income - a far larger source of their collection funding. The International Consortium of Library Consortia has issued a call to publishers to recognize the situation and ameliorate price increases (supported by CRKN etc.) Some minor effect has been detected (eg Proquest no increase; Sage CRKN sub reduced from 12/12/12% increase proposed to 3/3/3% after libraries refused agreement and, just recently, announcements by the AMS and OECD that they will hold their prices fixed).

The Library continues to discuss possibilities with the University Administration for ameliorating this situation but everyone is hurting. We are also following up with University Advancement about possible fundraising opportunities.

I realize that this situation is of concern to everyone at SFU, and would be happy to discuss it further.

(these comments come from a presentation prepared for the 2007 Canadian Library Association Conference)

The Library IT environment has become increasingly complex over the past few years as we have moved beyond the basic desktop, integrated Library System, email, and web server requirements. Most academic libraries are now engaged in supporting chat reference, link resolvers, and digital and web content management systems including institutional repositories. The line between what should or can be supported within the Library and what can or should be supported by campus IT depends very much on the culture and resource allocation within the institution. This argues for the library to consider the adoption of open source software only if

• there is already in-house programming expertise or
• the software is sufficiently critical to the library that it is worth reallocating resources to hiring a programmer, at least on a contract basis or
• if the software can be supported elsewhere for a fee, (usually considerably lower than commercial equivalents).

Using library open source software introduces more complexity and, if in-house library expertise doesn't exist, the issue becomes not only one of campus IT supporting those technologies, but also a question of whether or not to adopt specific open source software based on available expertise.

Often the adoption of open source software requires in-house (or campus-based) programming expertise and thus goes beyond the basic support provided by technicians and many systems librarians, support which is more often than not housed in the library. While it can be argued that the ILS is mission-critical to the Library and to the University and thus deserves central support, it is often harder to make that case for Open source software, though with the advent of open source ILSs, the issue becomes more complex.

From 'the Linux story': "Libraries have highly specialized software needs because the library community has developed its own complex standards and protocols to facilitate things like interlibrary loan, meta data sharing, and federated searching. Until recently, lack of commercial support made implementing open source unfeasible for libraries without an IT staff. Also, open source alternatives weren't perceived as scalable or feature-rich enough to handle the complex needs of most libraries. Now, commercial support has facilitated new levels of collaboration between libraries through sponsored development."

Having such a technical cohort in-house enables a library to move into new development areas relatively easily. Continuing and carefully cultivated good relations with IT enable the Library to demonstrate the value of maintaining an operation largely independent of campus IT while measuring up to their security and quality requirements.

Library software development could be funded in three ways: by external funding obtained from interested libraries or consortia, or through targetted grants, or, though it is not always thought about that way, by reallocating funding which might have gone to software purchases.

Recently the research libraries in British Columbia held a one-day workshop (presented twice) devoted to scholarly communication issues as they relate to our institutions (Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, University of Victoria). About sixty people attended the event which was led by six knowledgable librarians from the participating institutions. The process was a great combination of presentations, five-minute breakouts, group discussion and food. Judging by the vibrant engagement, it was a great success. Including librarians from different institutions within the same geographical framework enriched the exchange.

Having the opportunity to welcome the participants led me to assess, at least at the 40,000 foot level, where libraries and librarians are and should be in relation to scholarly communication.

Since the 1996 AUCC/CARL conference, there have been significant successes in moving beyond the exponentially increasing cost of journals, paid for through the academic library budget, but in reality a cost to the entire university. Not least has been the success of SPARC in supporting high quality low cost scholarly journals as well as advocating and informing in relation to many issues such as authors' rights. Numerous publishers have moved toward a limited term closed access model and allowing authors to retain copyright or at least some rights to the results of their scholarly research. Lawmakers and granting agencies have begun seriously to think about these issues. Vendors have responded to group negotiations with more flexibility than one might have considered possible ten years ago.

The questions I posed for the participants to think about (and of course many were addressed during the day) were:

• How do we make faculty/researchers aware of their rights and the implications of signing them away to themselves and to the broader society?
• To what extent should librarians be, in increasingly intrusive order: raising awareness, advising, advocating, or demanding changes in scholarly communication
• To what extent is librarians' motivation in advocating open access the saving of money as opposed to 'pure'?
• In other words, do librarians have a conflict of interest in their role in scholarly communication, as is alleged by publishers?
• To what extent is open access appropriate? achievable? sustainable?
• Finally, once we begin to answer these questions, who should play what role?

I went on to suggest that these are complex issues and it is worth putting the time and effort into coming to grips with them, and doing so in a cross-institutional context would benefit the process. Once they begin to be addressed, the question becomes one of strategy: who? where? how? to achieve them. As we plan our strategy, librarians should not be deceived into thinking we are leaders rather than partners, and perhaps lesser partners in the sense that we cannot achieve our goals without buyin from administrators researchers and publishers.

For example, in his blog, Peter Brantley (of the Digital Library Foundation) recently noted

... There's a lot of talk right now within universities about remaking scholarly communication, and with that, remaking the relationship between libraries and university presses... But what's becoming obvious to me is that there is often a pretty serious disconnect between these two worlds; in fact, a potentially crippling one...

...even in the most panglossian visions of e-publishing, you are still on the hook for the most important things that publishing has always been about: nurturing a work, building community, creating buzz, starting conversations. And the more I think about these central aspects of publishing -- the social aspects of publishing -- I am not at all convinced that librarians, despite their technical whiz with text/xml, have got even a basic clue about what these things mean. Building great, nifty mixed media products doesn't build viral marketing; doesn't find readers; doesn't build and audience; and doesn't find revenue.

One doesn't need to buy the whole argument to understand that it is important that we be aware of what others are thinking. As with all endeavours, strategy is as important as the end goal in achieving that goal. Librarians have a key and important role to play in what is not a revolution (though some may wish) but an evolution, and we must begin within the existing research context.