As a result of Binghamton University’s financial troubles, BU Libraries is receiving a large budget cut, causing the cancellations of certain subscriptions that may impact University research.

BU Libraries’ budget previously experienced cuts in the fall of 2018 with $450,000 worth of print and electronic resources. Last spring, the SUNY system ended its contract with ScienceDirect, a major source for scientific scholarly articles, because it was too expensive after negotiations fell flat. This year, the Libraries budget cut exceeds $1.4 million, affecting the Libraries as a whole. The cut to the collection development budget was particularly large, with $280,000 being slashed from journal and database subscriptions funding.

According to an article on the BU Libraries’ news page, the cancellations were chosen according to certain criteria.

“How often the resource is used, whether there are alternative ways to get the information, whether the resource provides access to full-text content or is only an index … and the price of the resource compared relative to their use,” were listed as criteria on the website.

Jill Dixon, associate University librarian for public services and collections, explained that the impact of the cuts extends past collections and into other library services as well.

“The budget cuts two years ago primarily affected the library collection,” Dixon wrote in an email. “For this cut, we needed to reduce library hours as well as cancel additional library collection resources. With the hiring freeze, it has also impacted other library services due to reduced staffing that has affected our ability to move forward with new projects and initiatives.”

BU Libraries hosted a town hall meeting Monday afternoon to discuss the impacts of the budget cuts. Curtis Kendrick, dean of libraries, noted that BU Libraries will look for feedback as to how the cancellations impact research.

“These are pretty difficult decisions to have to make,” Kendrick said. “We’ve identified a list of titles that we’re proposing to cut this time around and we put that out and want to talk to people about what the proposed list is, and get a sense of what the impact is going to be on research at the University. The other thing we’re looking to do is eliminate some titles we have — some actual print collections that we’re already holding onto.”

James Galbraith, head of collection development, discussed the challenges faced in regards to these cancellations.

“Because we had a budget cut two years ago and now we have the subsequent cut, we’ve had to cancel quite a bit of material over the past few years,” Galbraith said. “And, when you first start the process you’re able to find a lot of, what we think of as more low-hanging fruit, where we’re able to make cancellations that aren’t quite as painful. But this year, when you look at the list of items that we’ve canceled that was sent out with a message about this, we had to cancel some items that we really do value and it was a matter of finding the least painful things to cut.”

Kasey Serafin, a sophomore double-majoring in environmental studies and philosophy, politics and law, said students already need to look outside of the library for resources and further limiting available resources would make it worse.

“If you are someone who does scientific research and need to find and read specific types of information in the library, the limited resources really suck,” Serafin said. “Most of the time we have to go online to outside websites and sometimes even pay for articles and journals rather than be able to go to our own library and rely on it for information relating to our topics.”

Galbraith reaffirmed that BU Libraries are looking for feedback on the impact of these cancellations.

“If this impacts your ability to do research, if it impacts your classes or the study that you’re doing, we definitely want to know about that,” Galbraith said.

A second town hall will be held on Thursday at 10 a.m. Zoom registration information for the town hall and the current list of cancellations can be found on the BU Libraries news page.