University Library News

Georgia State University

The University Library is pleased to announce the purchase of a group of library materials and databases with funding that was available at year’s end. It is unusual that we have this kind of money to spend on library collections, and is a circumstance that is not likely to occur in the future. In the past year we have not had to use our operating funds for various types of maintenance or replacement that normally required operating fund investments. This was due to the availability of funding from the Transformation project, which will be completed in late fall. We have also not filled some open positions during the period when our service desks were consolidated and we didn’t have sufficient experience to determine where we could most effectively assign staff positions. As we settle into the Learning Commons we have a clearer idea of where we need to allocate our funds, and we will have significantly reduced salary savings in the coming years.  We feel it is important to emphasize that one-time funding has limited utility in the current information environment, and if we are to continue to maintain and strengthen the collections you rely on for your research, we need more consistent and reliable annual funding.

Our purchase criteria was fairly straightforward  we looked at resources, primarily databases, that do not have high continuing fees, since that requires a commitment beyond one year that we cannot make with one-time funding. We also took a special look at databases in the Humanities and Social Sciences, where the number of scholarly databases has greatly increased in the past few years. And, of course, we looked at requests from the faculty over the last several years, and at the university’s curricular and research programs, to be sure our purchases will serve the needs of our faculty and students. We are happy that we can improve the research environment for our faculty and students, and are confident that you will see the benefits of the purchases we have made.

List of purchases

*Author ID: 95 Author name: Tammy*