News > December 6, 2007

By Kevin Koehler | Online editor

The Z. Smith Reynolds Library is seeking an additional $1 million for its yearly budget to buy books and journals. Without it, library officials say, faculty and student research could be seriously impeded. A recent survey conducted by ZSR found that its yearly budgets for such acquisitions has fallen behind the library’s peers.

“Soon after I came here (three years ago) ... I thought that we were pretty substantially underfunded,” Lynn Sutton, ZSR director said.

“We’re trying to both meet the needs of students, which I think we do extremely well, but also meet the needs of faculty who are asked to be teacher-scholars,” Sutton said.

“And we were not doing a real good job in the scholar end of things. Frankly, because we weren’t funded on a level to buy the materials they needed.”

Sutton researched the acquisitions budget of two dozen medium-sized private institutions with libraries comparable to Wake Forest, including Tufts, Southern Methodist, Lehigh and William & Mary.

“I found that we were near the bottom. It was clear that we needed $1 million a year to reach the median of that peer group, which is a pretty modest goal,” she said.

The current acquisitions budget is approximately $3.4 million, including endowment income.

The university’s “Situational Analysis,” compiled for the strategic planning process in January 2007 mostly corroborated those findings. Its report read, “The Research Advisory Council (RAC) has documented the university’s inadequacies in research support.”

It cited a “ lack of ... research-level library materials” as one factor contributing to “a high degree of frustration among scholars.”

A survey conducted for the report found that 74 percent of the faculty questioned thought the library needed more resources, while only 32 percent of students did.

In the last decade, the price of books and journals has skyrocketed, in addition to rising subscription costs for online databases.

Meanwhile the library’s funding has not increased significantly.

“The fact that our budget has hardly moved just means we’ve had to cut out resources and choose to not purchase things. Said librarian Rosalind Tedford, who purchases reference materials , “keeping up with inflation is another huge thing.” Those cuts have most hurt many new majors and interdisciplinary programs added at the university in recent years, according to ZSR staff, as there were negligible new funds added with the new needs.

The library has also not been able to keep up with demand for Internet resources to the staff’s satisfaction because it can be a pricey proposition.

“We want our students and faculty be able to access things in the most convenient way. Very often that’s online and very often that’s more expensive than buying in print,” Tedford said.

ZSR has also been lobbying to build an off-site storage building to store more volumes, at a estimated cost of $1 to $2.5 million.

Presently, the shelves are 90 percent full, above the 80 percent industry standard, according to Sutton, which allows for the adding and circulation of books without reorganizing an entire stack.

“Some areas of the stacks are too crowded, and it’s hard to fit all of the books on one shelf sometimes,” said senior Kelly Curran, a ZSR employee.

“You might have to rest the books on top of others instead of in line with the rest, which is problematic because they are out of order.”

Currently the library pays a rental fee for off-site commercial storage, which helps create space and holds 110,000 volumes for about $1 per volume per year.

The least-used volumes are sent there and brought back when requested.

A new building would further free up room to allow for the construction of new lounges and a number of other physical improvements in ZSR’s long-term plans designed to make the library more user-friendly and a better study space.

The goals for a larger acquisitions budget and new storage building were codified during the library’s crafting of its own strategic plan, one of many across campus developed in conjunction with the university-wide strategic planning process that began 2006 and is slated to wrap up in 2008.

A preliminary draft released Oct. 27 said, in part, “Attracting and retaining a great faculty and ensuring their success requires a world class library. The acquisition and serial budgets of the library must be increased...”

“We’re awfully glad that this administration is taking it seriously that the library needs increased resources for faculty and student success,” Tedford said.

“Lots of other departments on campus also really need great things. So time will tell how much money we get, but we feel pretty confident that that’s become a priority for the administration.”