In February, when thousands of journals were relocated by the library, the math department faculty made it their mission to have their journals returned.

The Faculty Senate addressed the move and Faculty Senate President Alan Rosenbaum said the journals were being removed from the library because they were on electronic reserves.

Professor Douglas Bowman was head of locating and retrieving the Math Department journals. Bowman said there were about 25,000 volumes of journals of all subjects that the Founders Memorial Library staff got rid of.

“My understanding is that someone at the library noted that those were available electronically,” Bowman said. “This decision was made without consulting the Math Department at all.”

Math journals consist of new mathematical findings, written and researched by professors of NIU and other universities. The journals contain mathematical expressions that cannot be easily found electronically and are important for various types of reasons for mathematicians, said Bernard Harris, chair of the math department.

“A mathematician can, for example, often see that two complicated formulae are the same even if they look very different,” Harris said. “No electronic search routine can do this, but it is easy enough to do when browsing through a printed journal.”

Luckily for the math department, the America Institute of Mathematics (AIM) wanted to take NIU’s math department journals.

“The America Institute of Mathematics said ‘we’ll take them’ and they took nearly all of them, about 3,000 volumes of math journals,” Bowman said.

The total cost of recovery of the math journals would be roughly about $9,000.

“We have to reimburse the AIM,” Bowman said. “About $5,000 for what the AIM spent to get them out there. Our shipping cost is about $1,400 for getting them back.”

Other expenses like storage of the journals were factored into the total recovery cost as well.

The math department has reached an agreement with the dean of the library to split the cost of recovery. The math department already has funds available to pay for the recovery of the journals.

“The department has some funds available,” Bowman said. “Most organizations have some leeway money.”

Some of the other departments, like history and English, have either not met to discuss the matter or chose not to comment at this time.