A standing-room only crowd attended the ALL-SIS Collection Development Committee Roundtable in Boston on July 11, 2004. The topic, “Coping with Budget Cuts”, generated an hour of thought-provoking discussion. The Roundtable started with an explanation by Mike Chiorazzi of the University of Arizona’s law library and Georgetown’s Doug Lind of how those schools have coped with dwindling budgets. Georgetown faced a twenty-five percent cut in the book budget which led to a cancellation of many items including duplicate serials, many digests, and most print Shepard’s. Arizona has instituted similar cuts, and is moving towards emphasizing service to faculty and students above collection size.
Comments from other librarians from a variety of public and private law schools indicated similar actions have been taken throughout the academic law library community. Many law libraries are working towards greater cooperation with main campus libraries and other means of cooperative collection development.
With only an hour allocated for discussion, all in attendance agreed that the discussion of how to deal with shrinking budgets and increasing costs needs to continue. Ideas for continuing discussion include another Roundtable at next year’s AALL meeting in San Antonio and perhaps a program proposal for a future AALL meeting. If you have any ideas or suggestions for further discussion on this topic, please contact Collection Development Committee Co-Chairs Doug Linda at lindd@law.georgetown.edu or Connie Lenz at lenzx009@umn.edu.