THE VALUE

The Partnership Among South Carolina Academic Libraries is a recognized best practice for the stewardship of state funds. PASCAL leverages by more than five times the overall purchasing power of each dollar spent through cooperatively and collaboratively sharing resources and costs.

 

 

Core PASCAL Programs	PASCAL Cost	Open Market Cost
PASCAL Delivers (2009)	$400,000	$1 Million
Electronic Resources (2009)	$900,000	$3.6 Million
Lost Resources*	$700,000	$5.6 Million
Total	$2 Million	$10.2 Million
*Electronic resources cancelled in 2008 and 2009.

THE PROGRAM

PASCAL Delivers – Cooperatively shares 11.5 million academic books among the state’s institutions of higher education using technology and a courier service.

Electronic Resources – Provides around-the-clock shared annual access to scholarly and academic research resources to SC students & faculty.

THE IMPACT

PASCAL places the information of a university research library at the fingertips of all 230,000 of the state’s college students and faculty.

THE ISSUE

State funding for PASCAL has been cut from $2 million to $170,000. Without restoration of funding to the $2 million level, the PASCAL program will end June 2010.

THE STAKES

Students will lose information access. Faculty will lose research materials. Institutional accreditations jeopardized. The state will experience a “brain-drain” as students and faculty seek programs in other states that provide 21st-century library resources.

THE REQUEST

The Commission on Higher Education has again identified PASCAL as one of its top budget priorities for higher education and has requested for FY 2010-11 that $2 million in recurring funds be restored to provide essential core support.

 

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PASCAL is the Partnership Among South Carolina Academic Libraries, a consortium of South Carolina's academic libraries working together with their parent institutions and state agency partners. For more information, please contact us or visit our website (http://pascalsc.org).

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