Executive Summary This is a summary of the longer document and budget produced by the Library Council and should be read in conjunction with them.
Immediate action is needed, especially in two areas.
The transition to an Electronic Library places additional stresses on the traditional library, which already faces rising acquisition costs, insufficient staffing, and inadequate shelving and other storage facilities. Notwithstanding the Library Council's support for the trend of allocating increasingly larger portions of the budget to the new electronic library, the acquisition budget must still rise by an amount at least equivalent to the annual inflation rate for printed journals and books. Even more pressing is the need to hire more staff, especially a senior librarian responsible for collection development and management. A librarian is desperately needed to co-ordinate the development and management of both the traditional collection and the newer electronic collection. Finally, while space constraints ultimately will be eased by the transition towards documents in electronic form, a critical interim step is to use new compact shelving to house the mounting volume of traditional printed material.