We are requesting an increase from $235 to $300k to reflect increased costs and increased demand. Tech Fee is vital for maintaining library subscriptions to high quality content and discovery tools. These include content from Elsevier, Springer, Proquest, EBSCO, Hein, and other respected academic publishers. Tools include discovery indexes such as Criminal Justice Abstracts, PsycINFO, SCOPUS. Unfortunately, automatic increases for inflation were not built into this recurring project. Our subscription costs in particular have been increasing steadily, by about 4 to 8 percent per year, but the project funds remained constant. Initial vendor proposals frequently demanded increases of 12% to 16% or higher. Through persistent advocacy and leveraging consortial relationships, e-resources librarian has worked to minimize these increases.
We've cut some subscriptions, but can't cut more without doing serious damage to our collections. .We have reached the limit of efficiency and further cuts would now require removing essential digital resources.
Since the inception of Tech Fee in 2002, the library has been allocated funds for electronic resources. We received our first Tech Fee funds in 2002 for this recurring project, of 140k to be spent on electronic databases, journal articles and books that can be used by students in the Library, elsewhere on campus and from home. We had some increases in the allocation and by 2014 we were being allocated $235k annually.
We need to keep up with increased costs and higher expectations from faculty, staff and students. In addition to keeping up with increased prices of current subscriptions, we would like to add new resources, e.g. access to the entire community to The Atlantic, and to Policy Commons. After 12 years without an increase, we are now asking for $300k annually for this recurring project.
Electronic resources are available to all John Jay current students, staff and faculty, 24/7 from any computer on campus or via a username and password through the library’s proxy server from off-campus. Each journal title can be accessed from the library’s A to Z journal list. Books, journals and articles are also indexed in OneSearch, the library’s discovery system. Resources in over 100 databases are searched millions of times each year.
Lloyd Sealy Library
Ensuring our students and faculty have easy access to authoritative, scholarly works and secondary materials is vital for effective teaching, learning and research. E-resources include monographs, reference works, textbooks, magazines, newspapers and many, many academic journals. E-resources provide seamless instant online access to high quality, trustworthy information sources on campus and remotely.
Teamwork: Electronic resources librarian Ignacio Sanchez acquires most e-resources & ensures they are accessible & discoverable. Acquisitions librarian Maria Kiriakova purchases e-books & librarian Jake Adler catalogs them.
Ignacio Sanchez & Ellen Sexton.
Strong library collections are essential to support student learning and faculty research, which are two of the three elements of the strategic plan Vision:
• Educate students to be fierce advocates for justice in a rapidly changing future.
• Support world-class research and a justice-minded faculty.
Ensuring the library’s collections are strong and our discovery tools efficient addresses many of the Strategic Plan’s Goals & Objectives directly or indirectly. This project specifically addresses supporting student information literacy (goal one, objective e); enhancing students’ critical thinking and research-based academic writing (goal one, objective d). It supports faculty to build on John Jay’s reputation for excellence in research (goal two, objective c).