Budget Outlook
A structural deficit in the collections budget has emerged over the past several years owing to a combination of several factors, chief among them the fact that campus has not made an inflation-based enhancement to the base budget since 2001. During that eight-year timeframe, publishing industry data confirm that inflation in the prices of books and journals have continued apace amounting to 23% for books and 45% for journals.
An overview of the challenge that we have presented at the Academic Senate Library Committee is available at Facts in Graphs (PDF). The final figure and chart in this document depict the nature of the structural deficit that The Library has in the past several years committed to covering internally via the deliberate strategies of redirection of operating expenses and aggressive fundraising. However, the scale of the deficit in aggregate that we have committed to fund through these one-time sources is daunting, rising from $1.5m this fiscal year to $3.35m in fiscal year 2012. In the final year of this plan, fully one-quarter of our expenditures will be covered from one-time, principally donor-based, sources. With anticipated cuts to operating expenses and fundraising challenges, this strategy is no longer viable.
