From today’s Guardian:
University libraries represent the intellectual bedrock of Britain’s academic institutions. They are an essential support to scholarly research and teaching. The last quarter century has seen exponential growth in academic productivity, especially in the sciences, and this has been accompanied by increases in the number and size of scientific, technical and medical journals, such as those published by Reed Elsevier.
But with reduced funding for university libraries, their purchasing power has fallen in relative and absolute terms. Although university budgets have kept in step with inflation since the 1970s, and in many cases outpaced it, the proportion of the budgets allocated to libraries has fallen by about a quarter, from 4% to 3% of total spent …
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