Present: Kevin Mulcahy, Laura Mullen, Bill Hemmig, Jim Niessen, Rebecca Gardner, Jane Sloan, Karen Hartman, Triveni Kulchi, Tom Glynn, Kayo Denda, Jackie Mardikian, Helen Hoffman, Martin Kesselman, Gracemary Smulewitz, Mary Fetzer, Ying Zhang, Sara Harrington, Jeris Cassel, Mei Ling Lo, Connie Wu, Ryan Womack, John Shepard.

Minutes: NBCG, Special Meeting on Next Year's Budget, 4/21/06

Kevin first congratulated Tom and Kayo on their promotion with tenure.

The discussion was primarily based on some of the suggestions from CDC as to ways of providing some savings system wide. Kevin handed out the following for reference purposes -- FY2006 Fund Report which currently has a 336K free balance, 2007 State Fund Collections Reduction Scenarios (based on an 8% reduction), and a listing of the FY2005 top 25 databases in order of costs. Depending on the cuts, we may be looking at a deficit of approx. 360K to 800K. A guiding principle from CDC is the importance to cooperate and communicate across all campuses. Strategies from CDC are listed below with input from NBCG:

• Prepay wherever possible using the current free balance of approx. 366K and other funds.
• Cancel all print duplications of print journals except when license requires multiple print subscriptions
• Wherever possible cancel print in favor of electronic. It was mentioned that this might also save some expenses with binding, shelving, claiming, etc.
• No-binding for a year? -- This will only realize a savings of approx. 75K but may have other costs attached -- greater costs for binding the following year, loss of negotiated discounts with current binder, replacement costs for greater risk of missing issues.
• Look at central memberships -- there was very little enthusiasm from CDC nor NBCG on this one as many of the memberships provide access to collections and resources for the RU community. Some felt the membership in METRO might be cancelled but at 3K per year it is not a very significant savings.
• Can we switch vendors for better deals for databases e.g. switching this year from Ovid to CSA? Can there be some savings in lowering the number of simultaneous users we care paying for? Is further negotiation on pricing possible with some of our vendors? Gracemary and Serials team are looking into that.
• Eliminating databases -- look for duplication of subjects and full-text between packages, look at little used databases we might be able to live without, develop criteria to look at this is a methodical way. This is something each of the collections groups should look at. Cost savings from eliminating any full-text collections will result in added costs in document delivery.
• Canceling journals -- Again, if it comes to this, each collections group should develop criteria such as where RU faculty publish or cite, impact factors, etc.
• Approval Plan -- currently 70% of the funding for the approval plan is coming from non-state funds such as the Van Waggoner gift for which the principal is decreasing at an alarming rate. NBCG felt that completely canceling the approval plan makes no sense but it does make sense to look to cut some publishers from the plan, to narrow the profiles for some subject areas, and thus make the approval plan a bit leaner.
• Reference -- It was suggested that the Generalist group take a close look at reference titles and savings from less duplication of print and consider electronic subscription for titles that might otherwise be purchased in multiple print copies.