april05b.indd


creativity and leadership 
Joan Gotwals 

Growing
needs
and
limited
budgets


The challenge of supporting print and electronic resources 

Funding college and research libraries has never been easy, but today it is es­
pecially challenging. Supporting the hybrid 
environment of the print and the electronic 
worlds and the multiple needs this creates, 
as well as keeping up with rapidly changing 
technology, requires increasing library re­
sources. At the same time, our institutions of 
higher learning are struggling to meet over­
all costs of higher education. After years of 
significant tuition increases, there are grow­
ing concerns about the affordability of high­
er education in the United States. In a recent 
study cited in the New York Times, only one 
state, California, was highlighted for afford­
able higher education opportunities.1 Col­
leges and universities without question are 
under substantial pressure to slow the pace 
of rising costs and, in many cases, restrict or 
cut budgets. As responsible citizens of an 
institution that asks all units to exercise re­
straint in expenditures, librarians must ask 
serious questions about what and how they 
do things and seek to find the most effi cient 
ways of supporting institutional priorities. 

With this as background, let me fi rst touch 
upon the many needs and challenges of the 
hybrid library and, secondly, explore fund­
ing sources and strategies to support such a 
library. Clearly for most libraries, needs go 
well beyond the capacity of the operating 
budget provided by the institution. 

As librarians understand and college and 
university administrators often do not, the 
role of libraries and librarians is ever more 
important in assisting users in the hybrid 
world to navigate the dizzying universe 
of electronic information and relate these 

sources to print and archival materials. It 
also requires greater subject expertise and, 
I believe, will likely result in a need for 
more Ph.D.s on the library staff, especially 
in research universities. Because of recent 
discussions and publications about student 
use of the Web, online learning, and “empty 
libraries,” it is necessary to always keep the 
library’s role “front and center” for all to see 
its value and centrality to the success of the 
institution as a whole. 

Because of content knowledge and ex­
perience with information resources of all 
kinds and formats, librarians need to be 
actively involved in the support of classroom 
teaching and the development of interactive 
courseware. They need to perform as liaisons 
to academic departments, teaching effective 
search methodologies so students and fac­
ulty find and use the full range of available 
print, archival, film, video, audio, and Web 
resources. Librarians need to help faculty 
develop the best ways of conducting research 
projects when digitization is involved, so that 
the digitized research results can be preserved 
and made readily accessible and usable for 
future generations of scholars. 

Challenges of the hybrid library 
In the hybrid library, the technology needs 
are costly and difficult to sustain. Keeping 
current with changes, replacing equipment, 
acquiring new systems, obtaining network 
connections, paying for furniture and pe­

Joan Gotwals is former vice provost and director of 
libraries at Emory University, e-mail: libjig@worldnet.att.net. 

© 2005 Joan Gotwals 

294C&RL News April 2005

mailto:libjig@worldnet.att.net


ripheral supplies, as well as providing the 
essential training for staff, all necessitate 
substantial expenditures. Securing suffi cient 
funding requires real ingenuity. In my expe­
rience, allocations for technology have been 
the most inadequate and least realistic of all 
the areas in the budget. 

Space also remains a major need in the 
hybrid environment, not only for growing 
print collections but also for accommodating 
and supporting new and evolving service 
and staffing needs in the electronic world. 
While much is available electronically, print 
material continues to be essential, especially 
in supporting ongoing academic programs 
in the humanities and in many parts of the 
social sciences. With the cost of print publica­
tions worldwide continuing to rise, libraries 
can expect to acquire, house, and support 
both print and electronic collections for the 
foreseeable future. 

While exploring all possible funding 
sources and strategies, librarians must con­
tinue their never­ending efforts to educate 
those in the central administration about 
library concerns and challenges. In addition 
to what has already been said about teaching 
and research, librarians need to stress how the 
library helps define the profile of a university 
or college by its areas of strength and in key 
ways assists in attracting faculty, students, and 
visiting scholars. In all of these educational 
efforts directed towards the administration, 
librarians need to carefully and thoughtfully 
enlist the support of faculty and students, so 
that faculty and students can explain in their 
own way how importantly the library affects 
and touches their studies and research. I 
found that positive support on the part of the 
faculty was much more effective and valuable 
than a confrontational stance or an angry 
protest about the administration’s treatment 
of the library. 

No matter how well budget negotiations 
go, librarians need realistically to explore 
all sorts of possibilities for funding sources 
beyond institutional allocations. Such possi­
bilities include partnerships, collaborations, 
private funding sources, foundation and 

government grants, individual donors, estate 
planning, corporate giving, and all sorts of 
imaginative fundraising initiatives. Early in 
the process, it is important to explore po­
tential partners or collaborators on campus, 
something the central administration usually 
encourages. 

Working collaboratively 
Libraries can benefit greatly from collabora­
tive efforts to work with the campus infor­
mation technology unit in providing services 
in the electronic realm. Working together 
in offering services not only helps contain 
the institution’s costs, but, best of all, it of­
fers more seamless service to the end user. 
Some institutions choose to integrate the li­
brary and the technology unit in a new kind 
of organizational structure, most often seen 
in smaller liberal arts colleges. Others favor 
close working relations between the library 
and the technology division but prefer to 
maintain separate structures. 

The campus offers various other possi­
bilities for partnerships or collaborations. A 
collaboration of great benefit to all parties is 
a library fellowship program, which we were 
fortunate to establish at Emory University. 
In Emory’s case, the key collaborator was 
the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 
although it could just as easily be one of the 
other schools. 

Each year the graduate school funds about 
five library fellowships for PhD students to 
work on library­defi ned projects.2 These fel­
lowships provide the students with valuable 
working experience in their subject areas and 
help the library accomplish major projects 
that it could not otherwise fund. Most of all, 
they enrich the students’ total educational 
experience and serve to open PhDs to the 
possibility of future careers in libraries, which 
some fellows have elected to pursue. 

On a different level, there are many oppor­
tunities for partnerships between librarians 
and faculty members on grant­funded proj­
ects. For example, at Emory we had a joint 
faculty/librarian project to study the effect of a 
library skills course on student exam scores in 

April 2005  295 C&RL News 



an anthropology class. I might add that faculty 
members teaching the anthropology course 
also reported that classroom discussions were 
much richer in subject content after the skills 
course. There are various examples of digi­
tizing projects, which include staff from the 
library and staff from the university press, all 
working with faculty in a mix that enriches 
the research process and the fi nal electronic 
products, as demonstrated in the electronic 
material produced at the University of Virginia 
and Columbia University. 

Storage facilities for growing 
collections 
In addressing space needs for growing print 
collections, many libraries elect to use stor­
age facilities, which are typically much less 
costly to build and maintain than a full­ser­
vice library and do not require prime cam­
pus space. In many cases, off­site storage 
facilities are built, maintained, and funded 
by libraries in a geographic area working 
together. Some have experimented with the 
use of automated retrieval systems, which 
greatly reduce the footprint required for the 
facility and substantially increase its capacity. 
Especially interesting are experiments with 
on­site automated retrieval systems now op­
erating in a few locations. On the subject 
of print journals, a regional or central re­
pository seems like an appropriate and less 
costly longer­term strategy when electronic 
versions of the journals are available. JSTOR 
is currently working with a university library 
on a pilot project to maintain a repository 
for print copies of journals that are available 
in electronic format. Progress on this project 
will be important to follow. 

The importance of fundraising 
Grant funding and library fundraising activi­
ties are for most college and research librar­
ies a real necessity in the ongoing effort to 
obtain adequate resources. Fundraising has 
become a significant responsibility for li­
brary directors. In building a database of po­
tential donors, many librarians find it help­
ful to keep records of persons attending its 

sponsored events. By doing this, librarians 
are also able to identify alumni supporting 
their activities. This creates an opportunity 
for subsequent contact with these alums for 
development purposes. Without this dem­
onstrated interest, the library cannot easily 
target alumni for initial cultivation purposes; 
institutional practice usually limits alumni­
access to the school that the alum attended. 
Whenever possible, librarians should seek 
to find a campus fundraising partner with a 
shared interest or funding need. Joint cam­
pus projects or initiatives have advantages 
for fundraising. They enlarge the potential 
donor possibilities and frequently gain more 
attention and assistance from the campus’ 
central development department. 

Fundraising itself takes considerable time 
and effort and requires an appropriate level of 
library staff devoted to supporting the library 
director in identifying funding possibilities 
and actively representing the library’s inter­
ests within the context of campus develop­
ment. Among many goals listed for fundrais­
ing, the creation of an endowment fund for 
technology needs to be considered a priority. 
It is important to have an ongoing funding 
source for this major area of library need, just 
as libraries over the years built endowments 
for collections. Library staff as a whole need 
regular updates on development activities and 
should be encouraged to think about possible 
grants, donor projects, and prospects for gifts 
and endowments. It is useful to have staff 
members think of themselves as the “eyes 
and ears” of the organization and pass on any 
useful information to library fundraisers. 

Grant partnerships 
Through activities in networks, professional 
organizations or consortia, a library can many 
times find a partner for a joint or multi­library 
grant proposal or grant­supported projects. 
The Digital Library Federation offers many 
ways to contribute and benefit from joint ef­
forts, as does the Research Libraries Group. 
Regional networks, such as SOLINET, provide 

(continued on page 300) 

296C&RL News April 2005



2. Avi Rosenthal, “Crunching cell phone 
numbers,” Electronic House Digital: Digital 
Home, April 20, 2004, electronichouse.com 
/default.asp?nodeid=2000. 

3. Kumiko Aoiki and Edward J. Downes, 
“An analysis of young people’s use of and 
attitudes toward cell phones,” Telematics and 
Informatics 20 (2003): 349–64. 

4. Ran Wei and Louis Leung, “Blurring 
public and private behaviors in public space: 
policy challenges in the use and improper use 
of the cell phone,” Telematics and Informat­
ics 16 (1999): 11–26. 

5. LibQual Survey, Joyner Library, East 
Carolina University, May 2003. 

6. Karl D. Kryster, The handbook of 
hearing and the effects of noise, physiology, 
psychology and public health (San Diego: 
Academic Press, 1994), 52. 

7. Ibid., 85. 
8. CellManners.com, “Forum—Cell slang,” 

www.cellmanners.com/forum/slang.htm. 
9. Ibid. 
10. Michael Knecht, “Cell phones in the stacks,” 

American Libraries 34 (June 1, 2003): 68–69. 
11. Wei, 1999. 
12. Charles P. Bird and Dawn D. Puglisi, 

“Noise reduction in an undergraduate library,” 
The Journal of Academic Librarianship 10, 
no. 5 (1984): 272–77. 

(“Growing needs...” continued from page 
296) 
opportunities for libraries to join others to 
accomplish what they could never afford 
to do alone. Of course, partnering with 
commercial entities is also a possibility, of 
which the biggest example is the recently 
announced digitization venture of Google 
and five major research libraries.3 The An­
drew W. Mellon Foundation, the Henry Luce 
Foundation, the National Science Founda­
tion, National Endowment for the Humani­
ties, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, 
and the Delmas Foundation are just a few of 
the various sources that offer libraries excel­
lent grant opportunities. 

The rewards of these partnerships, grant 
projects, and various innovative initiatives 
are great not only in providing funding for 
specific needs, but also for providing an 
important learning experience for staff. The 
experience helps to develop new staff skills 
and expertise to better support learning. As 
a result of these initiatives, the library cannot 
help but attract growing recognition from 
the campus community for all that it does to 
support the institution’s mission. 

Success for the future 
Over the years, I have had serious doubts and 
worries about the sustainability of college and 
university libraries in the complex hybrid envi­
ronment. However, as I recently refl ected on 

all the accomplishments of the last decade and 
the resourcefulness of librarians, I fi nd myself 
feeling somewhat more confident about the 
future. Remarkably, librarians have found 
ways to address many needs and challenges. 
In looking towards the future, I believe that 
library staff members as a whole need to be ac­
tively involved in discussions and encouraged 
to think creatively about how the library’s role 
will be evolving in the future and what impact 
this has on needed resources. Creativity and 
innovation are key elements in the library’s 
success in years to come. It is my belief that 
librarians will not only find ways to meet the 
needs and challenges of the hybrid library, but 
also will define and create an exciting, new 
interactive learning environment with a range 
of rich resources readily accessible to faculty 
and student users. 

Notes 
1. National Center for Public Policy and 

Higher Education, “Measuring up 2004: The 
National report card on higher education,” 
San Jose, California, 2004. 

2. The number can actually vary from 
year­to­year depending on the length of the 
student work schedules, covering either the 
whole academic year or two semesters. 

3. Harvard University, the New York Public 
Library, Oxford University, Stanford Univer­
sity, and the University of Michigan are the 
five institutions working with Google. 

300C&RL News April 2005

www.cellmanners.com/forum/slang.htm
http:CellManners.com
http:electronichouse.com