NIU’s Founders Memorial Library will throw 739 academic journals overboard in attempt to keep its department afloat amidst the waves of high inflation and administrative apathy.

This year’s cut, which amounts to $203,000, is the library’s attempt to run damage control in response to an administrative budget cut and an underestimation in last year’s serial bill.

“About $141,000 got trimmed out of our budget this year,” said Library Director Ronald Provencher. “Basically, 6 percent of the materials budget was cut. The other thing that happened was that the cost of last year’s budget was underestimated and those bills had to be paid out of this years budget—that was at least another $100,000.”

Provencher said a $50,000 cut was made within the library’s department to help ease the strain on the materials budget.

“The monographs were automatically cut so we could get enough money back to buy the journals we need,” he said. “Then we went back to get some scholarly monographs.”

Provencher said the cut is the latest in a series which began in 1988, when the library cut 1,000 journals out of its budget. Since then, the library was forced to make two more cuts in its budget which amounted to a loss of nearly 600 more journals.

Additionally, Provencher said this year’s cut might be, in part, because of a conservative cut in 1991.

“We cut eight percent out of our materials budget in 1991 when it probably should have been a 12 percent cut,” he said. “The temptation is to hope for the best—people in the library don’t want to cut books.”

Provencher said the library’s downhill run in buying power has had a great deal to do with an enormous rise in the cost of journals, which has averaged 10 percent per year for the last several years.

He attributed the sudden inflation to several changes in the ways that publishing companies have done business over the years as control of the industry has been handed from the universities to larger, profit-seeking corporations.

Provencher also attributed the problem to a federal tax law which allowed the government to tax publishers on their overstock inventory of books. In addition, he said the combination of an exodus of publishing companies from the U.S. and the falling worth of the dollar in international markets has added to the problem.

“The overall buying power of our budget has been half of what it was in 1988,” he said. “Essentially, the budget for library materials has been flat since 1988—it has hovered around $2 million.

“We’ve cut this collection enough times that there isn’t any fat left in it,” he added. “We’re going to be cutting into the bone now.”

Although the Illinois Board of Higher Education has attempted to help the problem, it has not succeeded to bring the library’s budget out of its slump.

The IBHE requested a 10 percent increase in funding for all state university libraries for the 1992 Fiscal Year. NIU’s library received the increase, but a report in the Consul of Directors of State University Libraries in Illinois 1992 update shows the library had lost the 10 percent because of additional administrative cuts by the end of the year.

“The way to fix the problem is to get the U.S. Senate to develop some regulation to control the cost of scholarly materials,” Provencher said. “The professors and professionals can help the problem by refusing to buy overpriced journals and starting to publish their own bare-ground journals.”

In addition to this year’s cut, Provencher said he feels the library might drop more journals as early as this spring.

“This is something suffered by most university libraries right now,” Provencher said.