NYSHEI News

The International Coalition of Library Consortia is meeting in Charlottesville, Virginia.  The hot topic is worldwide budget crisis.  Gathered here groups from Japan to Norway, including NYSHEI, are sharing strategies to protect library budgets, obtain better pricing options from publishers and generally support libraries.

NYSHEI Executive Director Jason Kramer offered remarks to the plenary session on the economic crisis to the assembly, stressing NYSHEI’s efforts to maintain a broad coalition and advance the concern of academic and research libraries among public decision makers.

Commentary and musings from the ICOLC conference will follow in subsequent posts.

We have a state budget.  Rather, we will have a state budget as soon as the legislature passes it in the next day or two.  The budget is written, agreed to and now sits atop legislators desks waiting for the obligatory three days for it to “age” before passage begins.

Details about the budget will dribble out over the next few days as people try to figure out what is in the budget.  While there are usually a few surprises in the budget, this year’s version was developed in unprecedented secrecy.  The NY Post’s Fred Dicker blasts the process here.  The actual budget, with details lauded by the Executive, is here.

Budget overview stories are available from, among others, the Albany Times Union and the New York Times.

The vital statistics are that this budget will spend $131.8 billion, which works out to about $12 billion in new spending.  The Governor and legislative leaders also claim the budget deals with a projected budget deficit of $17 billion.  It is not apparent how this works mathematically.

Included in the budget are $7 billion in new taxes, which critics say will make state revenue reliance on the income taxes of high earning New Yorkers even more disproportionately acute.  There are also $170 million for new pork projects.  The largest budget cuts, about $2.3 billion, will fall on the health industry.  Total cuts come to $5.2 billion.

Ominously, the current year budget problems were handled with non-recurring federal stimulus money.  Temporary federal money will account for $7.2 billion of the new spending, and another $6.2 billion to plug the projected budget gaps.  Since most of this money will expire in 12 to 24 months, and the Governor’s budget director only projects a one percent growth in the state economy over that time, everyone should expect that very tough budget decisions lie just over the horizon.

In a statement jointly released on 12 Februrary 2009, the Association of Research Libraries, the Asscoation of American Universities, the Coalition for Networked Information and the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges state that universities need to do more to disseminate the knowledge generated by campus research.

The statement broadly acknowledges the economic role of knowledge dissemination and the public responsibilities of universities that recieve all manner of support from state and federal governments, among other entities.

Read the full statement.

So says the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

“Even if you’re prepared, you’ve got to be able to afford to go,” said Doyle, an assistant professor of higher education at Vanderbilt University. “… Based on our measures, it’s very expensive to attend higher education in New York.”

Read the full news article

At this moment in time, Oxford University has compiled an absolutely, fairly unique list of the ten most irritating phrases in the English language. With all due respect, I personally think it’s a nightmare to limit the list to only ten. But, at the end of the day, Oxford provides a fair start to an effort that should continue 24/7 until all irritating phrases are eliminated.

My nominee for eleventh place on the list, “not for nothing.”