1. Library Funding Dear Provost Marley: The one absolutely indispensable element of every research university is a good library. Funding trends in recent years, however, have resulted in a continuous decline in the number of library resources available to students and faculty. If these funding trends continue, our campus faces the very real threat of not being able to support students and faculty with the resources they need to ensure that the university remains a bona fide national research university. In essence, between 1997 and 2014, the library’s materials costs have been steadily rising, at the rate of about 7.5% a year, while funding for the library has increased just over 1% a year during the same period. This is unsustainable. Thus far, we have dealt with the problem by cutting subscriptions to journals that either are not often used or have a high cost- per-use. Indeed, the entire focus of the Faculty Senate's Library and Learning Resources committee in recent years has been on how to cut library resources.

2. Library Funding Because of this growing problem, the library has not been able significantly to expand its resources in needed areas. This will be a real problem for the campus’s new signature areas and new academic programs, such as business, which will no doubt require additional library resources to function effectively. Although we have thus far been able to manage effectively the flat funding of the library by cutting low-use resources, the future looks bleak. We had to purge a much larger percentage of our high-cost journal subscriptions this year than in the past. Most troublingly, if funding trends continue, next year we will be forced to consider cutting journals and/or databases that we see as central to fulfilling the mission of the campus. Another year of flat funding, for example, would force us to consider cutting a large number of journals from the Wiley and Elsevier journal packages. You are undoubtedly aware that the ability to conduct high quality teaching and research is dependent on timely access to scholarly publications. To preserve the quality of the Missouri S&T library’s resources and services, we hope that the administration will be able to increase its level of support for the library and engage in ongoing discussion about campus access to scholarly resources.

3. Library Funding YearPeriodical Price Index Library Materials Budget ($millions) S&T Total Expenditures ($millions) 1998/1999365.20$1.22$114.1 (1999) 20141132.11$1.47$174.2 Total rate of increase 209%25%52.7% Annualized increase12.875%1.56%3.5%