At the heart of every university is its library.
Perhaps the one place most students hate to be but can’t seem to stay away from is being threatened by, you guessed it, budget cuts.
What else is new? So the library will have another cutback on paper and ink. Prices for printing will be raised. So what?
Here’s what: there’s more.
What is the one thing students and faculty alike use the library for? Research. And pretty soon, the library’s databases may no longer be there. Interlibrary loans will not exist, because we will no longer have a way to easily contact other universities for their materials.
Though most people don’t think about it, databases and interlibrary loans are what we depend on. Who looks up a book anymore? You’re more likely to go online and research the thousands of articles available there instead, only grabbing books when a certain professor requires at least two for your paper.
But those options are only available through LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network, which is, of course, paid for by the state.
LOUIS is located on Louisiana State University’s campus. LOUIS staff members are the ones who put all of the information we use every semester on the internet for about 47 Louisiana colleges, universities, museums and more. It was established in 1992 by the Board of Regents and receives about $3 million in grants and fees every year, according to the LOUIS Web site, www.lsu.edu/ocs/louis.
Obviously, this very important resource costs a bit of our state’s budget to maintain. It is not free for participants, and Nicholls does pay to use it. To have a similar system of our own would cost even more than it currently does, since the price would not be shared with over 40 other members.
This isn’t the state’s first budget cut, and LOUIS has been threatened before. Just last year, LOUIS would have been cut if not for fund raising added to the small budget they still had.
This year, the network will probably not be so lucky.
Students, faculty, staff and the community need to once again raise their red flags and get on the ball. The Board of Regents has not committed any amount to the funding of LOUIS so far, and it is likely to be endangered again with the newest string of budget cuts.
LOUIS got lucky last year, but it may not happen again.
People need to start sending letters (yes, again) to the Board of Regents members and staff, state elected officials and governor Bobby Jindal, asking them to reinstate funding of LOUIS.
Without it, the quality of students will decline as they fall back on older, inadequate research methods and future students look for schools with better resources.
And though Jindal has said that higher education needs to learn to be more efficient with less “unnecessary” funding of underused resources, how are students expected to be more efficient without the one resource they all rely on?
