3 PSU Library Budget Overview

The fiscal year 2021-2022 general collections budget for the University Library is $4,071,902 from our education and general funds. This money is divided up between electronic resources which can be databases, data sets, journal packages, journal subscriptions, one time purchased ebooks & streaming media and the purchase of physical materials which are generally DVDs, newspapers, print magazines & journals, and print books .

Here is the general breakdown between the two:

Online/Electronic Resource Budget: $3,943,764

Physical Materials Budget: $112,498

In the past five years, we have received funding from the Office of Academic Affairs to cover inflationary costs on packages and ongoing subscriptions. In FY2021, we asked providers to either keep us at a flat inflationary rate (same cost in 2021 as the costs were in 2020) or at a rate of no more than 2% last year’s cost in order to avoid significant cancellation of content. We were successful in negotiating these percentages with most providers for that fiscal year. However in FY2022, we received a $70,000 cut to collections budget to cover inflationary costs and we are seeing an increase from 2% inflation up to at least 3% inflation on most of our resources. We may find that we need to cut further into collections that renew closer to the end of our fiscal year. In addition, we received a very strategic cut back in funding received from the online student use fee which has resulted in us having to curtail spending on streaming media in particular.

Our goal is to fund collections at the macro level as opposed to the micro level in order to leverage our funding as best possible. Here is what the general format breakdown looks like:

As the pie chart indicates, EJournals & Databases are the major expenditures of the collections budget.