NYS Assembly Standing Committee on Higher Education
Hearings to Examine the New York State Higher Education Commission’s Preliminary Report and Its Initial Recommendations
January 24, 2008
Good morning. My name is Lynne King, and I am the Director of Library Services at Schenectady County Community College (SCCC). I am here to speak to the importance of the Higher Education Commission’s recommendations for New York’s academic libraries and our role in expanding world class higher education in New York and in building the state’s information-based innovation economy.
I would like to thank you, Assembly Member Glick and members of the Assembly Standing Committee on Higher Education, for the opportunity today to comment on the Higher Education Commission’s preliminary report.
I would also like to thank you for your work on the Higher Education Commission and for the clear understanding in the preliminary report of the opportunity for New York’s academic and research libraries to play a much more direct and effective role in New York’s economic growth. The money spent by public and private college, university and research libraries in New York to license online resources can have much greater impact if it is spent cooperatively through state-wide shared licenses rather than individually. Not only can a wider array of online materials be made available to campuses and research libraries throughout the state, but through shared licensing, more affordable options for libraries at small campuses can support coursework for students in workforce development programs that are at the heart of our competitive state economy.
New York’s competitive advantage in today’s global economy is clearly information-based innovation. Your efforts will allow libraries to help supply that information.
The $15 million in state appropriations recommended by the Commission for shared licensing among academic and research libraries will help achieve these important economies of scale for information access.
The goal of state-wide shared licensing has been primary for New York academic and research libraries for some years, and many librarians and information professionals have worked diligently to move beyond the funding limitations of our individual campus environments to act cooperatively in reaching this objective. To further the effort, public and private academic and research libraries created a membership organization, NYSHEI, the New York State Higher Education Initiative in recent years. This organization is responsible for the shared licensing proposal that the Commission has embraced in its recommendations. New York’s academic and research libraries are poised and ready to move forward with a specific proposal, as supported by the recommendations of the Higher Education Commission.
The library community owes thanks to you, Assembly Member Glick, for stepping forward as a sponsor of Assembly Bill 9672, which seeks appropriations for NYSHEI’s ARIA proposal, along with its companion bill in the Senate (S 6741). We are optimistic that your bill will be successful.
Briefly, ARIA, which stands for Academic Research Information Access,--librarians are notorious for using numerous, arcane acronyms and abbreviations like this one--seeks to acquire shared licensing for online science, technology and medical information resources appropriate for higher education and research communities in academia and among business and industry partners. For this purpose, the bill requests $15 million administered through the Department of Economic Development.
The digital knowledge network that ARIA would create builds on an existing collaboration of the state’s public and private academic and research libraries. This is an extensive infrastructure in which even libraries at small campuses such as my own play a vital part. For example, my library shares information from our collections that support specialized fields in our curriculum such as fire science, nanoscale materials technology, and aviation. These materials are supplied to other New York academic and research libraries that need material not covered in their own collections. Most people are surprised to learn that Begley Library at SCCC is actually a net lender, providing more items to other campuses than we borrow each year.
But while there are ways that a small library such as ours can contribute to the community of New York academic and research libraries, there are areas in which we lag far behind because of our small size and small budget. The annual cost to license many of the online information resources appropriate to the academic programs at SCCC are well beyond our means. For example, we could spend close to half of our online budget on access to just one legal database for one of our programs, our Paralegal degree, but instead only one user at a time can access the database from a library computer in order to afford that resource for our students.
This is why ARIA and the Higher Education Commission’s recommendations are so important to my library and others like us, including CUNY community colleges, for example. By pooling our efforts with other New York academic and research libraries to negotiate for lower-cost, state-wide licensing of electronic resources that many of us need in common, our library has a fighting chance at effectively supporting the programs that our college offers to educate the future members of New York’s innovation economy. If our library could save money on a science or technology database currently in our collection through ARIA licensing, we would re-invest that savings, for full access to that legal database we need, for example.
To conclude: It is important for New York’s academic and research libraries to acquire the means to cooperatively acquire online information resources through shared, state-wide licensing. The impact will not be limited to teaching, learning and research, but will also address the essential need to recruit and retain leading faculty at our institutions who expect a significant level of library support for their work. Likewise, there is the need to support the academic and industry partnerships that are so important to the economic future of New Yorkers.
The recommendations of the Higher Education Commission and proposed legislation such as Assembly Bill 9672, the ARIA act, are the means to tap the potential of New York’s academic and research libraries to strengthen both higher education and its economic impact.
Thank you again for this opportunity to speak today. I would be glad to provide any additional information you may want or to answer questions.
Lynne King
Director of Library Services
Schenectady County Community College
Schenectady, New York 12305