Category: Budgets

Is there any part of the university that has been more transformed over the past decade than libraries?  One of the fascinating things about looking through old Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) statistical reports is how many things weren’t counted, say ten years ago.  Expenditures on databases?  Not counted.  Logins to databases?  Searches or article requests?  Nope, nope.  Not that those things didn’t exist back then – they just weren’t central enough to university missions to be thought worth

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) recently issued its annual statistical report.  I thought I’d take the opportunity over the next couple of days to take a look at a few interesting patterns in library practices and expenditures.  They shed some interesting light on the pressures Canadian academic libraries face right now. Some methodology here: CARL has 29 university members, from the very large U of T (almost 74,000 FTE students) to UNB (under 8,000 FTE students).  As a