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BL
24,1 Hedge your budget risk through
service increases
Terry Cottrell
6 University of St Francis, Joliet, Illinios, USA
Received 29 July 2010
Accepted 3 August 2010 Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a case at the University of St Francis (USF), where
common fears and, in some cases, harsh realities of library budget reductions can be strategically
allayed or altogether avoided through creativity, changes in motivation and implementation of
redesigns in organizational work flows and tasks.
Design/methodology/approach – The USF Library shifted focus away from a reactionary stance
against pending budget cuts toward a proactive strategy in order to circumvent anticipated reductions
in funding for library operations and staff.
Findings – Changes in attitudinal and service posturing created an environment that allowed the
USF to show itself as a more essential function of its university as a whole. The changes suggested in
this paper add more workload to USF existing library functions, but also add more interested
stakeholders.
Originality/value – This paper offers insight and direction to practitioners looking to investigate
the feasibility of selectively increasing workload in order to increase overall value to their institutions,
resulting in budget security during harsh economic times.
Keywords University libraries, Budgets, Information services
Paper type Case study
Introduction
When recently asked by a direct report, “Why exactly are we doing this?”, the
appropriate response could only be, “Because in this environment, the library’s
bag-of-tricks has very few ‘No’ responses left”. Budgets are flat. Budgets are negative.
Budgets are in danger. A junior librarian asking a library director why a new service is
being added to a variety of offerings already shared by a decreasing workforce and
operations budget is one of the most valid and logical questions anyone could ask.
Then again, when the numbers look bleak, are not all services and offerings subject to
review, re-review, and yet more scrutiny and examination? The core of any library
involves the support and delivery of intangibles that bolster tried and true
revenue-producing activities. Teaching brings tuition dollars. Libraries support
teaching. This is simple enough to understand. When catastrophic change in the
economy tips the willingness of prospective students to pay premium prices for
The Bottom Line: Managing Library
teaching and all other associated support systems, it is the support systems that are
Finances weeded first. When faced with cutting learning support activities, like library services,
Vol. 24 No. 1, 2011
pp. 6-12 sometimes an actual expansion in those services will divert attention away from the
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0888-045X
library and toward areas that have less potential to offer mass appeal to all user types
DOI 10.1108/08880451111141999 involved in the teaching and learning experience.

2. The case at the University of St Francis Library Hedge your
Located 40 miles Southwest of Chicago, the University of St Francis (USF) is a small, budget risk
Catholic, private liberal arts college serving approximately 2,200 FTE students, with a
library of over 150,000 volumes. USF is enrollment-driven. If the American economy is
truly changed forever, where decisions are made from hypes and bubbles until a crisis
serves as a new defining reality, relying on students as consumers who will respond in
a predictable fashion is no longer an appropriate business model (Etizioni, 2009). USF 7
can only accommodate 350 residents on its campus. This leaves the bulk of its revenue
stream to the commuter, full-time student – students who are not generally on campus
enough to make adequate use of a physical library. A good library manager will
attempt to balance staff load with service delivery regardless of patron type, no matter
what the prevailing economic conditions forecast. In small, academic libraries, the
culture of the campus dictates where funding is centered, and to which departmental
initiatives funding is allotted. Only the “worthy” services survive in financial
downturns.
Strategy of centrality: the few, the proud
One strategy to counter-balance the library as a traditional overhead-cutting center on
a campus is to increase the amount of services offered to users. The hypothesis is
simple: providing excellent services to non-traditional users garners outside fiscal
support as much as it fosters the intellectual support of students and their faculty – the
traditional users. How can libraries provide the same levels of service with fewer staff,
and fewer staff financial incentives? Before considering this, consider the opposite:
library directors are caught in a particularly rough bind bearing the brunt of budget
cuts from their supervisors at the top, and pressure from their subordinates below.
Library survival is a popular, macro-level question of strategy in this scenario, but
there is a more important concern. Recession or no recession, the desire for research on
a university campus will remain. As a result of this, how library staff culture can
continue to stay cohesive and effective is the more seminal discussion for library
leaders needing to preserve the character of their internal staff structure, while
providing research services with much less funding. Reductions in staff and services
are not always a certainty.
Without a strategy, the library director is sunk. In a recent Harvard Business Review
article, Michael Jacobides says, “In an age when nothing is constant, strategy should be
defined by narrative – plots, subplots, and characters – rather than by maps, graphs,
and numbers” (Jacobides, 2010, p. 76). The strategy of the USF library is to provide a
multitude of services that are so effective and so relied upon that users feel they are
essential, and cannot be done without. Starting with the fact that it is the library that
sees more students per day than most other university departments gives a mandate
from which libraries may demand budget stability. It must never be forgotten to
remind and reinforce that the library is commonly also in one centralized location. This
is a selling point from which negotiations over dollars should start.
Because libraries produce no hard products, no grades, no credits, and no
transcripts, they are always already married to the selling of their worth through
intangibles. Libraries have gate counts, usage statistics, and other traffic numbers to
support their claims. More importantly, however, libraries have the pulse of the users

3. BL on and off campus, and serve as a heart in a very true sense. Eschewing the erroneous
24,1 assumption that a campus is a metaphor for the human body, and therefore risking a
perception of arrogance from peers on campus, it is wiser to have a more robust
approach. Persuading a campus to believe they are less reliant on one core service and
truly more reliant on three or five increases a library’s chances of being one of the few.
The argument here is that almost any university library can convince, win, and retain a
8 priority space within a small niche of core services that is only a few deep. It is a
mistake to sell a library as the heart of a university versus selling the idea that a
university always has more than one heart, and that the library is certainly one. This
belief, through a willingness to increase services, will turn ideas of budget cuts away
toward services which are merely appendages to a university’s operations.
Quick tip
Arguing that the university has only three, four or five hearts (as opposed to the
traditional arguments that the library is the only one) will bring allies from the other
most powerful areas of the organization.
Services added that are now essential
One of the best things a library can do is to view its university from the basis of
resources (Pearce and Robinson, 2009). With this in mind, the USF library has found
that focusing on adding services it could provide that were both low cost yet high
touch would be services that make both the fiscally prudent and the resource-oblivious
smile. There are four different audiences that any library must satisfy; these are shown
in Figure 1.
Many articles on library management will laud the difficulties and challenges in
working with the last on the aforementioned list – the root of the Framework. Articles
regarding morality and communication, transactional and transformational leadership,
charismatic management and a whole host of other popular personnel strategies are in
no short supply (Sutton, 2005). The focus, however, should be clear: Research Services
and Upper Management are the focal point that will help solidify budget preservation
Figure 1.
Framework of academic
library stakeholders

4. during fiscal crises – the top of the Framework. The services that serve the upper Hedge your
portion, when articulated correctly to the lower portion, will indeed serve to avoid any budget risk
and all budget assaults.
Over the months of the most significant downtown in the US economy since the
Great Depression, the USF library has increased its service offerings, thereby
positively affecting its entire Framework of Stakeholders. The library made the choice
to offer: 9
.
test proctoring for individual students;
.
programming for senior citizens;
.
laminating services;
.
test proctoring for students of other colleges;
.
individualized tenure consulting and research for full-time faculty; and
.
24-hour text reference service.
A two-pronged approach: how the services work to facilitate importance to
budget priorities
Quick tip
Any and all service additions and changes during fiscal hardship must be remembered
under the vein that all organizational change is:
.
centered on providing superior service;
.
not reliant on a single magic formula;
.
dependent on thoughtful analysis by skilled budget managers; and
.
doomed to fail without staff buy-in (Kirk, 2008).
Table I shows the impact on both the upper-end and the lower-end of the Framework of
Academic Library Stakeholders through an expanse of services.
Each of the new services provided necessarily impact a library staff already
stretched thin. Some staff and external users cannot see the past, the fact that the
library would spend one dollar on services that are (with the exception of tenure
research) non-official research business. The most important issue to consider is that
all of this non-official research business has been fun, serves a positive purpose to the
business of the university, and ultimately makes it difficult to cut any aspect of library
operations come what may from the external economic climate. The perceived negative
impacts shown in Table I become positives toward the bottom line, giving the library a
broader financial vision of the future.
Quick tip
Non-traditional services are saving the budget dollars meant for traditional services.
Non-student, non-faculty patrons are the chief direct beneficiaries in many cases here
as they receive more services under this paradigm. The indirect beneficiaries of this
radical idea, however, are the students, faculty, staff and entire library budget as a
whole.

5. BL
10
24,1
services
Table I.
Library Stakeholders
and lower ends of the
through an expanse of
Framework of Academic
Impact on both the upper
Positive impact on core Perceived negative impact Positive impact on core Perceived negative impact
Currently under way research services users on internal staff Under consideration research services users on internal staff
Test proctoring for Faculty and students have Public services staff must DVD/CD disk repair Same as laminating services Same as laminating
individual students the convenience of track and account for services. Cost of machine is
scheduling flex-times for individual requests from high
testing faculty (web-based) for
student testing. Staff must
ensure quality control for
students taking tests
Programming for Alumni of current students Program is limited in scope, Institutional repository Single location for all Requires technical services
senior citizens are the prime users of this but involves faculty and a scholarly production on areas with commonly tight
service. Grandparents of committee of non-library campus. Increases library and trusted procedures to
future students are involved personnel. Work is dependence by creators of volunteer to organize new
as well distributed content. Centers library as and essential digital
natural location for materials produced in-house
publications and historic as opposed to those
artifacts acquired from outside
(Walters, 2007)
Laminating services Library is sole provider of Maintenance of machine Co-teaching/embedding Increases information May require contract
this service on campus. and ordering of supplies information literacy awareness of all students. renegotiation, job
Revenue is generated for the have additional task training within courses Increases visibility of restructuring and increase
library through this service library as core service in activity outside
provider traditional building spaces
Test proctoring for Transfer students are Same as proctoring for
students of other primary users. Future internal constituents
colleges students familiarize with
campus
Individualized tenure Faculty receive virtual Must be set up, maintained
consulting and “hands-off” automated and performed by a full-
research research assistance through time librarian. May require
RSS feeds of articles and staff redesign
other resources
24-hour texting Opens services to all users This opens staff to serving
service throughout the day. Popular non-academic and non-USF
with nomadic users constituents

6. From spark to results: attitudes at the top Hedge your
By offering unintended services, the USF library has actually experienced budget budget risk
increases during fiscal hardships, and has avoided round after round of cuts. Now, the
library is experimenting with the same concept by offering services to area Catholic
high schools to gain more support from outside members of its greater regional
network. The idea is that if even more people in the larger community see the USF
library as a community resource, then the stakeholders at the top of the Framework 11
will look elsewhere for funding cuts. Furthermore, pressures for enrollment-driven
institutions are magnified by competition from competing similar systems (Johnstone,
2009). In this case, private colleges and private high schools are often competing for the
same dollar. With funds being the prime mover, most importantly, what has been done
at the USF Library has not made traditional services subservient to new additions. It is
through strategic thinking, positive attitude, and reacting counter-intuitively about
recessions that win-win solutions are born with minimal outlay of staff time and
dollars. Large schemes, speeches, projects, or complicated partnerships will likely be
unsustainable and unpopular over time when money is tight (Guskin and Marcy, 2003).
Quick tip
Through service increases, and superior performance, a preference in upper
management to look to the library as a cost-cutting center has been assuaged three
years in a row.
Conclusion
There are a wide variety of issues to consider when looking at budget cuts during
harsh and unpredictable economic times. A solid vision of what is essential to overall
operations, combined with a boldness to look at and develop staff that can grasp the
confidence to take risks, will pay immense social capital when the time comes to hedge
through expansion. Recommending more services is counterintuitive to a staff already
cold to the idea that expansion is the true path to essentiality in the minds of users and
upper-level managers alike. Prepping and training staff through example and
reinforcement will cause a warming to occur that will facilitate high performance
despite the fear of poor economics. With careful implementation, a very satisfied
non-traditional user base can bear a surprisingly high community-level influence on
those who hold the keys to small campus budgets. The fact remains that an increase in
satisfied patrons, of any type, is good for all libraries.
References
Etizioni, A. (2009), “Spent”, New Republic, Vol. 240 No. 10, pp. 20-3.
Guskin, A.E. and Marcy, M.B. (2003), “Dealing with the future now: principles for creating a vital
campus in a climate of restricted resources”, Change, Vol. 35 No. 4, pp. 10-21.
Jacobides, M. (2010), “Strategy tools for a shifting landscape”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 88
No. 1, pp. 76-84.
Johnstone, D.B. (2009), “An international perspective on the fragility of higher education
institutions and systems”, in Martin, J. and Samuels, J.E. & Associates (Eds), Turnaround,
The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, pp. 31-48.

7. BL Kirk, T. (2008), “The merged organization: confronting the service overlap between libraries and
computer centers”, Library Issues, Vol. 28 No. 5, pp. 1-4.
24,1 Pearce, J.A. and Robinson, R.B. (2009), Formulation, Implementation, and Control of Competitive
Strategy, 11th ed., McGraw-Hill, Boston, MA.
Sutton, L. (2005), “Application of transformational leadership in an academic library”,
MLA Forum, Vol. 4 No. 1.
12 Walters, T.O. (2007), “Reinventing the library – how repositories are causing librarians to rethink
their professional roles”, Portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 7 No. 2, pp. 213-25.
Corresponding author
Terry Cottrell can be contacted at: tcottrell@stfrancis.edu
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