By IAN CLEARY
Copy Editor
 

The Treasurer's Office has undertaken a one year realignment of its spending strategy. Fackler describes this as "a technical adjustment to make sure that all of the college's financial bases are covered."

In the past an annual 3% across the board increase of funds has been allocated. The change has been made to ensure that the budget remains balanced.

Fackler explained that this is a one year phenomenon, saying "budgeting is a year to year phenomenon. You look at the dollars you have and you make decisions about where to spend. So the decisions range over time.... You have sixty percent of the dollars you spend here are for people, pay and fringe benefits. Then you start adding on things like utilities budgets and you get up to eighty, eighty-five percent of the budget that is, in the short term pretty well locked. With the rest of the margin you have the ability to tinker."

Book purchases are spread throughout the year in order to attain the best possible collection. The library budget has been hovering at around a million dollars in recent years. This money is split relatively evenly between periodicals and books. This year, however, the library will be purchasing 27% less books than usual due to the one year steady state spending adjustment.

This reduction in the volume of books purchased is actually due to the cost of periodicals. The market for academic periodicals and journals such as "The Journal of Parapsychology," is not large. The publishers of these journals realize that they are dealing with a small market of dedicated buyers, thus, they annually increase the cost of their publications by around 10%, knowing that numbers of subscriptions will not drop. This leaves libraries like Ladd with a fixed, rising cost.

Bates, according to Head Librarian Gene Wiemers, is constantly reviewing its periodical subscriptions for relevance, quality, and usage. Over the past four years the total value of canceled periodicals totaled $66,000.

This year alone 60 journals were canceled because of declining quality, obsolescence, or lack of use. Students searching for the latest editions of the Periodical of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Canada Year Book, The Midwest Quarterly, Pravda or The Portland Dining Guide will be disappointed this year.

Wiemers added that the school looks to fill holes in the collection and keep the periodical subscriptions in stride with the Academic curriculum. He also added that in many cases the titles the library has been dropping have been part of the, "mainstream, old fashioned, old guard stuff," such as the communist journal Pravda, which was dropped in favor of a different Russian journal. There has also been a swing to acquiring more journals in the fields of women's studies and queer studies, which are becoming more prevalent.

Despite the constant "culling" of the collection, the costs continue to rise and every year another 50,000 dollars has to be reappropriated to periodicals. In a normal year the library receives a total increase in allocation of between 6-8%, which allows the library to stay abreast of changes.

However, due to the technical adjustment, the library has not been appropriated the funds to match this rising cost. The half of a million dollars a year spent on periodicals, multiplied by ten percent, gives a figure of fifty-thousand dollars; this is the library's budget deficit for this year.

At the beginning of the year Librarian Wiemers sent a letter to the faculty explaining this situation. Costs such as periodicals, standing orders, and microforms - like any magazine subscription- are paid in advance and must be taken into account. In addition, Bates's commitment to on-line resources has forced allocation of certain financial resources for the purchase of electronic databases. Lastly, with the initiation of simplified borrowing from Colby and Bowdoin, shipping costs were expected to rise dramatically.

According to Wiemers, the only area available to redirect funds to account for these increased costs was the budget for purchasing "monographic" materials (i.e. books, videos, and sound recordings). Thus, 27% of this year's books deemed necessary and important to academics at Bates will not make their way to the shelves of Ladd in the immediate future.

What does this mean for Bates? If this trend were to continue for more than one year, which Fackler assures it will not, a significant hole would develop in Ladd Library's collection which would jeopardize Bates's academic standing. Next year periodical costs will again increase an average of ten percent and the book budget will again be the only area open to cuts. Wiemers expressed serious concerns about this.

However, Wiemers pointed out that every institution undergoes periodical fluctuations. A one year cut in funds, although troublesome, is not catastrophic; especially with the increased use of the CBB, research at Bates should not be too drastically effected. Nonetheless, two years from now there will be a hole in Bates's research collection. The library, along with the Library Committee (made up of students and faculty), plans to quickly address possible solutions aimed at filling this "hole" over the next few years.

However, for academic purposes, Fackler asserts that, due to the increased borrowing capacity allowed by the CBB consortium and the heightened number of databases, that this year's student body has access to more materials than ever before.