Dear colleagues,
Our university transitioned to R2 Carnegie status several years ago, and
since then, the university has tried to support increased faculty research
needs, most recently by individually funding new tenure-track faculty with
two years of research funds (the amounts for each faculty end up totalling
up to $6,000 for the two years, I believe). Simultaneously, the library
materials appropriation has remained flat, though we have been successful
in requesting some funding each year that does not get built into our
annual appropriation (it typically helps us cover inflation not
accommodated by a stagnant appropriation).
This dichotomy of funding has led several faculty to try to independently
acquire access to products from library vendors to use for their specific
research purposes. For example, WRDS (Wharton Research Data Services)
aggregates over 600 databases. We have a campus WRDS subscription to many
of their databases for faculty and student use, but we've had faculty reach
out directly to WRDS to initiate a subscription to a database (that is not
included in ours) for their research use. They expect to use their
research funds for these subscriptions, but at the end of their two-year
funding, they turn to us to continue it.
We have traditionally discouraged faculty/academic units from contacting
library vendors and establishing subscriptions that really should be
managed by the library. But we (the university) have also now created this
internal funding issue.
If you have had similar experiences of faculty requests for specific
subscriptions that would support their research and not be widely used, how
do you manage the requests? If they or their department offers to pay, do
you allow them to? Do you take over subscriptions that were established by
individual faculty without your purview? Do you have clauses to address
this issue in your collection development policy? Do you have guidelines
for faculty regarding contacting library vendors? Of course, sometimes
it's the other way around and a handful of our vendors will contact faculty.
Any new ideas are welcome!
Thanks,
Laura
*Laura Turner*
*Associate Dean *
*Head of Collections, Access, and Discovery*
Helen K. and James S. Copley Library / University of San Diego
5998 Alcala Park, San Diego, CA 92110-2492
Phone: (619) 260-2365 | lauraturner_at_sandiego.edu
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Received on Wed Aug 20 2025 - 12:51:13 EDT