Murphy Library News

To prepare for campus budget cuts, Murphy Library is asking for your help in selecting resources for cancellation. Please complete the short survey to share your thoughts. The survey will be open from Friday, April 3, to Friday, April 17. In FY16, on par with the budget cuts experienced by UW-L, Murphy Library must cut a portion of its collections budget.  The collections budget covers the licensing and purchasing of the many varied materials, both print and electronic, that make up all the library’s collections. In addition to the budget-mandated cuts, the library must also account for inflation in the costs of many of the continuing resources that make up the collections. In the near future, we’ll also need to consider UW-L’s increased FTE. Some vendors will increase subscription costs for certain resources when FTE reaches specific levels. 10,000 FTE is a threshold used by some of our vendors and UW-L reached it in Fall 2014. The cuts are substantial and amount up to $78,000.  Because of some confidentiality agreements in some of our license agreements with vendors/publishers, we cannot make pricing of specific resources publicly available. Please let us know your thoughts regarding the resources that have been proposed for cancellation. A one-page survey that lists the resources and allows you to express your thoughts is available here: https://uwlacrosse.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_a3FHAjq6uHOzaBf The options include canceling databases and/or reducing the acquisition funds for sub-collections such as monographs, reference materials (encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc.), multimedia and magazines/newspapers. Some of the criteria used to select resources for cancellation include

• The resource should be funded by Murphy Library only (not part of shared UWS electronic collections or BadgerLink, which is provided by the state)
• Cost per use
• Relevance to curriculum needs
• Possible duplication or replication of content, especially with resources funded by UWS or BadgerLink  (taking into account that the future of those resources is outside of our control)
• Accreditation needs from departments
• Primary mission of the Library

A note about interlibrary loan (ILL): while interlibrary loan can be used to procure books or articles from another institution, it has associated costs that are invisible to the user but that are paid by the library. These include fees to use certain ILL systems and networks, and charges by the lending library if we have to borrow an item outside our reciprocal networks (on average $14 per item.) If an article cannot be procured by interlibrary loan, a document delivery provider then must be paid for one-time use of the material (on average $25 per article.) Lending fees and document delivery fees are paid out of the collections budget. We value your expertise and comments about the proposed elimination of the titles outlined in the survey at https://uwlacrosse.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_a3FHAjq6uHOzaBf.