Our budget hasn’t kept up with our database and journals spending, given the growing demand for resources and especially journal price inflation, which has been averaging roughly 7% in recent years, well above the Consumer Price Index and the Higher Education Price Index. See the Journal Inflation graph to the right.
We had been paying for some databases out of a reserve fund that we had built up over the years, but that reserve fund is now gone.
We cannot make up the difference by cutting spending in other areas—collections, primarily journals and databases, make up the majority of our non-personnel expenses. We already have drastically cut expenses in other areas in recent years, as we have tried to keep up with journals and databases. See the Library Non-personnel Spending graph to the right.