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College Librarians Hope State Budget Includes $2M for Computer Program

Posted on: Friday, 14 April 2006, 18:00 CDT

By Karen Bair, The Herald, Rock Hill, S.C.

Apr. 14--Librarians at state college libraries are keeping their perennial watch, waiting to see if a $2 million joint computer program they could not afford individually will again be included in the budget the state adopts.

Librarians say the program, called PASCAL, is cost efficient and makes South Carolina colleges competitive with surrounding states that have it.

Last year, the House did not fund it, but the Senate did. So far, it's deja vu. Last year, the measure was adopted with the final budget. Sen. Wes Hayes, R-Rock Hill, said Thursday he believes the measure will make it through again.

PASCAL is short for Partnerships Among South Carolina Academic Libraries. Member libraries pay on a sliding scale. The program is not related to the computer programming language of the same name.

"In South Carolina, our institutions are fairly resource-poor compared to competition in this area and internationally," said Rick Moul, executive director of PASCAL, a consortium of 60 South Carolina public and private college libraries that negotiates a discounted price for the online services in bulk.

"There are some economic development aspects," Moul said. "Industries wanting to move into the area look at education. We are playing catch-up with every state around us. This has made huge strides in that."

York Technical College needs it for nursing, technology and science areas where online journals can cost 10 times more than other materials. It quadruples the number of journals Winthrop can offer for student and academic research. The libraries can get a book from any library in the state within two days.

Mark Herring, dean of library services at Winthrop's Dacus Libraries, said Winthrop had 7,000 online journals before PASCAL. This year, it offered nearly 30,000.

"Had our budget been tripled, we couldn't have afforded it," he said. "What is puzzling is, the state has called for programming collaboratively to accrue savings. Nothing describes that better than PASCAL. It saved about $5 million last year."

Most journals cost about $30 to $50, but those for science, medicine and technology average about $300 each, he said.

"This gives us better purchasing power in other areas and the ability to service underserved areas," said York Tech librarian Debbie Jones.

She cited the expense of journals for the college's nursing program. Savings from the PASCAL consortium enabled the library to individually buy business and automotive databases to "fill in the gap."

York Tech is a commuter campus of students juggling family work and school, and PASCAL provides distance-learning students equal access to materials, she said.

"At Clemson, USC and to some degree Winthrop, we allow them to deepen what they have to make them more competitive with other institutions," Moul said. "At smaller institutions, we are providing basic resources that they did not have access to before."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Herald, Rock Hill, S.C.

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Source: The Herald

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