Harvard University Library Semi-Annual CCDO & Technical Services Report ALA Midwinter 2010 Finances remain the most pressing concern of Harvard’s libraries, and of the university as well. Early indicators suggest that we’ve about reached our budgetary bottom, though any recovery still seems at least a year away. In the meantime, several separate initiatives related to the library are likely to prove at once disruptive and, we hope, transformative. Budgets, staff, and collections: Financial circumstances vary across the separately administered and funded units that comprise the Harvard University Library. The Harvard College Library, a dependency of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences that accounts for a bit less than two-thirds of the University Library’s purchases and activity, has seen its budget drop by about $12M over the past year. HCL’s ranks have thinned by about 100 positions (through a combination of early retirements, vacant jobs eliminated from the organization, and layoffs); more than 1,000 print subscriptions have been abandoned as we transition toward electronic versions of serials that provide trustworthy arrangements for archiving; services have been trimmed wherever possible. Our collections budgets have been affected as well, and face the further impact of a predicted 12% drop in endowment returns for the coming fiscal year. Paradoxically, cutbacks in the College Library’s structural funding for acquisitions have in recent years been repeatedly and unexpectedly offset by influxes of one-time funds. Extraordinary current-use gifts, a $1M grant from the University’s president, $700K in one-time foundation support, and transfers to draw down a few large (non-collections) fund balances have helped to sustain HCL’s annual spending around the $19M mark. The signs now, and again, point toward substantial decline in the coming fiscal year— but recent experience suggests that these forecasts won’t necessarily come true. Other units within the Harvard University Library have shrunk as well, at levels and rates that reflect each faculty or school’s distinct income streams and endowment dependencies, as well as varying approaches to absorbing one-time reductions. Some units may thus face further layoffs for the coming fiscal year, as well as sharp reductions in other budget categories. The impacts for Harvard’s library collections and services in the aggregate are not yet clear. Meantime, digitization work continues apace through ongoing programs to convert text, image, and audio files. Well over 2M locally-owned images, some born digital, are now available through Harvard’s VIA system. Internal funds are supporting digitization streams for images, medieval manuscripts, music scores, ethnomusicological field recordings, poetry readings, and pamphlets, among other materials. New partnerships are also taking shape, most notably a multi-year, multi-$M project with the National Library of China to digitize our more than 50K Chinese rare books, many not available within China itself. 1 Structures and services: Harvard’s Provost convened a Task Force on University Libraries, charged with recommending measures to increase efficiency and improve services, in the spring of 2009. The Task Force membership drew heavily from the faculty, who were also prominent on its four working groups (concerned with collections, information technology, research and teaching, and the library as place). The Task Force report was submitted to the president and provost late in the fall, and then shared throughout the campus community. Its recommendations focus particularly on rationalizing and simplifying our vauntingly complicated (a.k.a. “labyrinthine”) organization, which in large measure reflects the idiosyncratic accretions and entitlements of more than 350 years of history. In this context, even the most innocuous proposals are likely to provoke controversy. We expect years of adjustments, improvements, and change—and a comparable period of alternating euphoria, entertainment, and anxiety. An “Implementation Working Group,” composed of high-level University administrators, directors of key library units, and a single faculty member as chair, will now carry the recommendations forward. Task- oriented “subgroups” will be convened as well. At least some tangible results are expected by the end of 2010. Some changes may prove profound. Recommendations to unify the University’s negotiating voice and funding structure for bundled electronic resources, for example; or to sharply reduce the number of autonomous departmental libraries whose narrow mandates can work at cross purposes to broader priorities, will fundamentally alter relationships among our libraries, constituents, and the outside world. It remains utterly unclear whether the Harvard College Library, or any other of the University Library’s component units, will assume a significantly different relationship or role vis-à-vis the Harvard University Library.1 All of Harvard’s libraries anticipate substantial change as a result of the Task Force report. Many units are independently making shifts of their own, typically as a result of continuing processes that have been accelerated or reinforced by the financial crunch. The Harvard Kennedy School Library, for instance, is renovating its space and sharply reducing its collections footprint as it focuses more closely on services to students and faculty. The Law School Library has been somewhat downsized and substantially reorganized. Its collections-related shifts encompass aggressive measures to minimize cross-format duplication, including a deliberate inversion of collecting priorities for foreign law. The library traditionally privileged hardcopy legal resources from wealthy, high-profile nations like Great Britain and Germany, paying less attention to less central countries and regions. Resources from affluent nations are nowadays readily available online, and also routinely preserved by in-country agencies. The materials most at risk, by contrast, come from poor and/or unstable countries. These will now be emphasized. Within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, bibliographers and research librarians are meeting with every academic unit and department in order to explain the College Library’s budget limitations and elicit 1 The Harvard University Library functions as an umbrella organization for some of the University’s ca. 75 libraries. It also provides and manages such central services as our OPAC and other discovery systems, the Harvard Depository for off-site storage, and a sophisticated conservation facility. HUL enjoys a modest budget of its own, but derives much of its income from charge-backs for the services it provides. HUL’s two veteran Associate Directors, Dale Flecker and Barbara Graham, have recently retired. Helen Shenton, from the British Library, will soon assume a new, unified post as HUL’s Deputy Director, from which she will help to carry forward the Task Force recommendations and also manage HUL’s operations. Prof. Robert Darnton is the Director of HUL. 2 advice for collections priorities in an era when the unstated (albeit always unrealistic) expectation of “we’ll have it before you even know you need it” must cede to a different understanding and a new kind of partnership. Our conversations are structured around faculty perceptions of the resources that they require for their teaching and to support their current research, as well as those that should be acquired now to ensure that the library can meet the needs of scholars a generation hence. (This third question, which assumes that respondents can anticipate future priorities on the basis of their own research, general knowledge of the field, and insights from graduate student projects, has consistently proven difficult.) The process continues. As indicated, the Harvard College Library’s collections budgets have thus far held up surprisingly well. Deeper cuts are likely with time, but our reductions to date have primarily affected such discretionary purchases as newspaper backfiles, big ticket items, and large sets that we can normally purchase as needed, down the road. (The possible marketplace impact of many libraries adopting the same stance may be a topic for CCDO.) Other HCL operations are in the midst of more substantial change. Our principal (though by no means only) technical services operation, some 80 persons strong, is about to reorganize itself after a year of intense planning and preparation. The new structure will focus on functional areas and workflows (for example shelf-ready materials, resources with good catalog copy, materials requiring original cataloging, technological support, etc.), rather than the current emphasis on the geographic origin and language of our monographic orders and receipts. The new organization will support quicker access as it reduces handling and better leverages staff skills. Major changes in the HCL-TS organization of services since June include increased use of technology with the introduction of WorldCat Selection; a pilot for using YBP shelf-ready services; automated methods to collect and report acquisitions and cataloging statistics that will also provide additional collection management data; the integration and relocation of additional technical services units to our off-site facility; elimination of our processing backlog; and the elimination of serial check-in for the ca. 9,000 titles that are housed in the Widener Periodicals (Reading Room) Collection. The College Library more generally is edging toward a vision