Fiscal Year 2009-2010

THE ISSUE
State funding for PASCAL was reduced by 90% from $2 million to $200,000 (recurring) for FY 2008-09. The dramatic level of this reduction will translate into the effective elimination of PASCAL programs. Their loss will undercut South Carolina’s efforts to educate students and consequently our ability to compete in the knowledge economy.

THE PROGRAM
Since 2004, a $2M appropriation from the state has been used to develop and sustain two initiatives:

• PASCAL Delivers -- a rapid book delivery service that expands access to print-based knowledge statewide. It leverages institutional collection expenditures using an efficient centralized system.
• Electronic Resources -- extremely cost-effective central annual licensing of core electronic resources for higher education.

THE IMPACT
At the end of June 2008, this virtual academic library contained millions of articles licensed from over 13,000 research publications and over 10 million print volumes owned by the state’s academic libraries.
These heavily used resources vastly increased the knowledge universally available for teaching, learning and research in the state’s institutions.

Effectively, PASCAL guaranteed every one of the state’s 230,000 college students and faculty fingertip access to a quality, university-level research library, and it also substantially enhanced the collections and capabilities at our leading research institutions.

THE VALUE
PASCAL has been an efficient steward of state funds. Overall, the state has seen a seven-fold return in value for each dollar spent, based largely on the capability to license materials at the statewide “enterprise” level and by leveraging investments made by individual institutions through the resource sharing system.

THE STAKES
Elimination of PASCAL programs would represent a serious contraction in the knowledge-base for South Carolina higher education. Without PASCAL, the research materials we have licensed simply will not be accessible to most of our 230,000 students and faculty, especially those served by rural or smaller 2 and 4 year institutions. Even at our research institutions, trade-offs are being made. Similarly, the loss of our efficient book delivery service will translate into lost availability of research collections to many at smaller and rural schools, and higher individual transaction costs for services.

THE REQUEST
The Commission on Higher Education has requested $2.3 million in recurring funds in its FY 2009-10 budget submission in order to restore annual licenses and services that are being lost.

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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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