Possibly one of the hardest days of my professional career today as I had to meet with the Dean of my faculty this morning and explain basically that we've got no book budget and that we cannot renew the database we've had for the last year which many academics in the faculty really love.

Well of course - I think it's great too - it's full text and that's why when we had some money last year that we'd lose if we didn't spend, we bought into for a year knowing that it almost certainly was going to be a year and then we'd cancel it. In fact we were given 18 months access due to when we subscribed and that ends in a couple of months.

The snag is that two senior people who agreed to the 'one year' have moved on and those in their positions now are seeing it as a 'cut' rather than as a bonus for the last 18 months. Sigh.

Meanwhile, journal price increases have finally eroded the information resource provision portions of the budgets sufficiently that with no increase to the budget due to the economic situation, once we've cancelled the database and replaced the subscriptions to print journals that we cancelled to help pay for it, our book budget for the coming year will be zero. That'll be a first for my fifteen years doing this job.

Possibilities include accepting a book buying moratorium for a year. If we can start again next year, it shouldn't be a huge problem.
We could possibly NOT replace the cancelled journals to give us a small book fund for the year.
Or, and this is what I'm rather desperately hoping from the meeting, the Faculty itself might have some pennies lying around that they could contribute.

The meeting went as well as I might expect and I went armed with paperwork about decisions taken at past meetings (before he was Dean), allocation formulae, spreadsheets of costs and prices and anything else I could think of. He's a nice guy and I warm to him - and he sounds very pro-library which is good.

But my sleeplessness over this - which I knew would be a time all summer and had not been looking forward to it - isn't quite over yet as he's going to look at the papers and then get together with myself, the Head of Library and the acquisitions librarian at a later date. He's very keen to keep the database even at the expense of a book budget but at least sees how impossible it is with the library finances as they are at present.

I've spent the rest of the day trying to wrangle journal subscriptions and work out what we might cancel as we've been given a reprieve on a deadline for cancellations that I'd been told was past.

Quite exhausted now.