Critical Journal Subscriptions Required
Currently, the amount of information in the world doubles every 18 months. For BYU’s faculty and students to stay abreast of new advances and discoveries, they must have access to the latest scientific literature. To fill this need BYU’s library subscribes to thousands of journals in science, technology, and medicine.
Subscriptions to these journals can be very expensive, and the rate of inflation is difficult to manage. For example, in 2006 the journal Nature rose in price by 34% to a cost of more than $12,000 a year for the combined print and electronic subscription. Maintaining subscriptions to Nature and other journals is critical to the quality of education at BYU and essential to the research of students and faculty in the sciences.
To help solve this problem, the library is working to establish an endowment to fund subscriptions to science, technology, and medicine journals.
Rare Books and Manuscripts Must Constantly Be Added
Students and faculty in the humanities and arts frequently rely on unpublished manuscripts and rare books for their research rather than current journals. The Lee Library has one of the finest Special Collections in the country, with materials ranging from 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets to books and manuscripts that document the restoration of the gospel.
To support student and faculty research demands, however, the library must constantly add to its Special Collections, particularly in the area of Mormon studies. Unfortunately, the brisk trade in Mormon/Americana documents has driven up costs to the point that the library can no longer purchase some of the items that appropriately belong in a Church archive. The library seeks to establish an endowment for Special Collections that would ensure its capacity to acquire materials that illuminate Church history and strengthen testimonies.
Using Technology to Build a Library without Walls
Using digital technology and powerful electronic research tools, the library can now deliver books, journals, manuscripts, photographs, maps, and other images to students anywhere and at any time. The digital library never closes and can be used just as easily on campus, in a dorm room, or in an Internet café halfway across the world.
This “library without walls” serves the information needs of BYU students in Provo and also supports students, faculty, alumni, and Church members around the world who now have expanded access to previously unavailable resources that strengthen gospel instruction, enrich individual learning, and build personal testimony.
Building this new library is costly. Digital reformatting requires high-end equipment and significant staff hours. Fees for licensing electronic journals and e-books have increased nearly 15% annually over the past five years. The library is striving to build an endowment to help this unique resource grow.
