on campus
Knowledge economy
Revenue
2011 – 12
Revenue 2011 – 12
£ 2b
£ 866m
Revenue 2011 – 12
Big changes are inevitable for Australian libraries but technology, consultation and planning could make the end results a winner. By Geoff Hanmer
Revenue 2011 – 12
$ 253m £ 145m
Harvard spent US $ 109 million on its library in 2010 – 11 and, with an endowment of more than US $ 30 billion($ 32 billion), it’ s little wonder that Harvard has the best-funded university library in the world. Although not nearly as well funded, the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford has been a legal deposit library for more than 400 years, and consequently holds 11 million-plus printed items.
According to the Council of Australian University Librarians, the 39 university libraries in Australia spent $ 662 million in 2012 to cater for the equivalent of 904,000 full-time students, or roughly $ 732 for each equivalent full-time student load( EFTSL), not including the cost of providing and maintaining buildings. The bestfunded, the University of Melbourne, spent $ 47 million, and the University of Sydney, which has the largest collection in Australia, has just over 5 million items.
It is important that we develop online resources that reflect Australian concerns and Australian interests, particularly to support Australian history and culture. Whilst $ 662 million is a large amount of money, comparable with spending on public hospitals in Tasmania, for instance, no individual Australian university is ever going to be able to compete with the capacity of Harvard or Stanford to fund their libraries, or the depth of collection held by universities such as Oxford or Cambridge.
Compared with expenditure on libraries, online information sources can be remarkably economical. Wikimedia spent just US $ 28.3 million in 2011 – 12 to provide Wikipedia to 521 million people every month. AustLII( the Australian Legal
Information Institute) spent just over $ 1 million in 2012 to generate about half a million hits a day on AustLII, with about 26 per cent of these coming from the HE sector. AustLII is an Australian initiative supported by UTS and UNSW that has revolutionised access to legal information in Australia. Its technology and expertise is now being rolled out in Asia, India and the Pacific region.
Perhaps it is time to consider how we can improve access to information by developing alternatives to the present system, especially now that online access plans such as AustLII have demonstrated that a professional group can take back control of its IP from commercial publishers, and make it available to everyone at no cost to users. Similarly, Wikipedia has shown that crowdfunding and crowdsourcing an encyclopedia is not only possible, but can produce better results than anything previously available.
Of the $ 662 million spent on Australian university libraries in 2012, $ 207 million was spent on purchasing or subscribing to e-materials, including e-books and serials. Income and raw profits for academic publishers are astonishing, as the illustration( see top of page) demonstrates.
If only a small a proportion of the money used to fund university libraries were diverted to further encourage the creation of Australian online journals and information databases, we could enjoy richer sources of information and reduce the market power of academic publishers.
And If AustLII is any guide, a million dollars can do a lot, so the diversion of even 5 per cent of the library budget to provide money for discipline-based database projects could eventually radically reduce the cost of serial subscriptions and ensure that overseas-based corporations do not profit from intellectual property that government-funded universities produced. This initiative could make better information accessible to a wider audience at low cost – in many cases free to the user.
Whilst we are thinking about how to get better value from library funding, another obvious question needs to be asked: why do we have 39 separate university libraries with all the attendant inefficiencies that this brings? Sure, there are inter-library loans and some co-operative storage arrangements such as CAVAL, but would it not be better to concentrate funding on a few good super libraries that would provide effective last-copy protection and access to a greater breadth and depth of material?
It would still be necessary to provide a library at each university, but the primary mission of the on-campus facility would be to help students study and researchers find things. Storage of most printed materials, negotiation of subscriptions to e-materials and so on would be done by the super library. The number of seats for students at Australian university libraries varies by a huge amount and, as a result, some provide great learning environments whilst others do not. Universities that are serious about a sticky campus should be aiming to provide at least one seat for every five on-campus EFTSL. The most cost-effective way to increase the number of seats available in the library is by getting rid of books, as UNSW, Newcastle, Murdoch, La Trobe and others have done. Throwing books out
26 | campusreview. com. au