The NorthEast Research Libraries consortium has released a letter to publishers about the current collection development budget crisis its members face.
Here's an excerpt from the letter:
Financial officers in NERL institutions have been given–and shared with NERL–quite specific targets for budget discipline for the next 2 or more years. For example, in NERL's home institution, Yale University, reductions in our collections budget for FY 2009-2010 will be on the order of 10%, with a likely additional 5% already mandated for 2010-2011. Similar stories are told on many sides, with some of the heaviest impacts on the institutions among us that are the largest and have been the beneficiaries of important university endowments. Average actual dollar cuts across the NERL consortium are in the range of (minus) 4-5%, which we currently estimate as impacting overall buying power against normal increases on the order of (minus) 8-10%. . . .
Our goal with you and other information providers similarly placed is to find ways to achieve net price reductions in both next year and the year after. We hope to do this strategically and in partnership with you, in a way that allows us to stabilize a new working relationship on which to build in the years to follow. With some imagination and creativity, we hope we can strike new pricing models, or perhaps a menu of such models, which will enable institutions to do best by their faculty and students.
I hope and expect that we can do this thoughtfully, collegially, and in a spirit of mutual understanding and respect, realizing that the structural adjustments of these coming two years will impact and reduce permanently our ability to purchase content at pre-2008-09 levels.
