The LSU Faculty Senate on Monday unanimously passed a resolution aimed at increasing the university’s spending on the library by 6% annually until the budget resembles the average spending on college libraries.
The resolution is sponsored by the Faculty Senate’s Library Advisory Committee.
The resolution points out that LSU’s library expenditures are significantly lower than those of other flagship universities in the SEC. LSU’s total library expenditures were about $14 million in 2019. In that same year, the University of Florida’s were about $35 million, the University of Tennessee’s were about $30 million and the University of Kentucky’s were about $23 million.
The resolution cites LSU’s recent $245-million donation from Our Lady of the Lake and university President William F. Tate IV’s academic-first vision as reasons for increasing the library budget.
“The vast majority of scholarship is published in subscription-based journals or book publications, either in print or in electronic formats,” the resolution says. “All researchers, be this undergraduate students, graduate students or faculty members, routinely use databases to find and select publication titles within specific fields of research.”
The resolution reports that the library has to turn away students and faculty trying to reach a specific title over 100,000 times in any given year and that the demand for the interlibrary loan system has grown significantly.
LSU library total expenditures and book expenditures rank second from the bottom among SEC libraries, with just Mississippi State spending less money on their library.
The benchmark for bringing the LSU library expenditures up to the average reported by the Association of Research Libraries was chosen as LSU has hovered at less than half of the average for over a decade.
“Financial constraints prevent us from obtaining adequate collections to support a flagship institution like LSU,” Dean of Libraries Stanley Wilder said. “We have data (referenced in the resolution) that illustrates the impact of this problem to researchers and LSU students alike. The resolution presents a modest, gradual path to addressing this long-developing problem.”
Wilder also spoke in support of the resolution at the March Faculty Senate meeting when it first came up for discussion.
“We’re not able to provide the resources to support doctoral level research at this institution,” Wilder said. “But I can go on and on with ways of showing that the inadequacy of collections leaks through, everywhere you look, at every every metric.”
Professor of library science Ed Benoit said that increasing the funding would be a great first step.
“The library is woefully underfunded and does not match the standing of a flagship land grant institution,” Benoit said. “Without additional funding soon, I would be concerned about LSU losing its R1 status due to a lack of library resources.”
This is not the first time that the library budget has come up in the Faculty Senate. In 2015, the Faculty Senate passed a similar resolution, which called on the university to increase the library’s book budget.
While the state of the LSU Library has faced intense public scrutiny for many years, most of the discussion has centered on the status of the facilities, which are in dire shape.
The library requires significant investment, with about $30 million worth of deferred maintenance projects listed on the university’s project list.
Most notably, the library is in need of a new roof.
“The roof is already beyond its expected life,” Roger Husser, Assistant Vice President of Planning, Design and Construction, said.
Husser said the new roof would be coming within a year.
LSU has plans to build a new library and tear the current building down. LSU President William Tate IV has said that the new library will have fewer books, but instead be a center for technology.
A new library is not the university’s top capital outlay priority. Instead, the university is prioritizing a new interdisciplinary sciences building. LSU requested $1.5 million from the Legislature for the design of the new library.
The House of Representatives included funds for the design in its capital outlay bill, which passed the House last week.
Rep. Tanner Magee, R-Houma and the second-ranking legislator in the House, confronted Tate in committee about the university’s handling of library funding.
“Because of some students on Twitter complaining about the library, Rep. Davis and I actually set up a tour for the legislature to go see the library because I thought it was such a pressing need,” Magee said. “Now five years down the line, we haven’t made any progress on that front. And I wouldn’t really put the blame on the legislature to be honest. We’ve always had priority from LSU that was above the library.”
