News Report # 1

“S.C. Universities Face Loss of Shared Database Subscriptions”. American Lidrary Association. January 14, 2009 http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/currentnews/newsarchive/2009/January2009/PASCALmoneycrisis.cfm?persistent=&expy_dt=

The Partnership Among South Carolina Academic Libraries (PASCAL) budget was cut from two million to $200,000 for the fiscal year 2008-2009. PACAL is a group of South Carolina academic libraries who provides inter library loans services a well as data bases of scholarly journals. Due to the budget cut, PASCAL, stopped it LexisNexis database subscription as well as cutting back from five days a week for interlibrary loan delivery to three days a week. The data base service will continue until July but from that point forward the plan is to just be a interlibrary loan service. To help alleviate the budget cuts the libraries have started to require service fees for users. PASCAL’s parent organization, the Commission on Higher Education for the State of South Carolina, is hoping to convince the legislature to restore the funds for fiscal year 2009 2010 and is seeking the assistance of university presidents, who are showing strong support for the program. Support is also been available from student organization.

Despite the economic difficulties that the world is facing one of the last places that such drastic budget cuts such take place is on the higher education system, especially libraries. The subsidies that our government provides for our educational system ass allowed for us to have a high percentage of our population to pursue a college degree. One of the most important lessons that is gained from a college experience is how to gather information for a purpose. From perspective of a student it is hard for me to imagine doing a paper with out the help of online databases of scholarly journals. With the relatively recent switch to almost exclusively digital copies of journals it would be next to impossible for most students to get access to journal articles if Universities did not provide access to these databases. Journals provide students with an opportunity to obtain what is cutting edge in their specific field of study.