Brooks Library faces grim cuts

BY ANDREW RIED-MUNRO | Staff Reporter

From books to videos, music to magazines, Central Washington University’s Brooks Library is a wealth of knowledge and a quiet haven for studying students. But, with the current economic situation, Central’s library may be taking away some everyday resources.

According to Philip Tolin, interim dean of library services, the library is experiencing significant personnel cuts that could negatively affect the building’s patrons. The library must trim the goods and services budget, which will cut down on the purchase of movies, music, magazines, books and electronic resources.

“I think that the library is the intellectual center of the university, and any cuts are terrible,” Tolin said. “In that sense, we are in a time of economic decline and the university is making cuts all over.”

The library is making every effort to save and protect the electronic journal databases. According to Tolin, the library has reallocated the funds from the university that would have been put toward books, music resources, and visual media for the rest of this year to save the journals.

“It’s terrible when any cuts happen to any institution or any department at the university,” said Keegan Fulton, graduate student studying experimental psychology. “We have a lot of people with a wide range of topics that they are interested in, and it would be sad to see budget cuts affect the resources for those students.”

Tolin said that certain electronic resources will not be renewed after this year, including the e-book CQ, Association for Computing Machinery Digital Library, Congressional Universe, some of the full text found within the Wiley Interscience Database, Encyclopedia of American Government, and the subscriptions to Stat-USA.

As of now, the library anticipates even more cuts, which will lead to further reductions on purchasing and bigger cuts to journal and serial titles and electronic resources.

“That would be sad because I use the library a lot,” said Laura Wilson, sophomore Spanish language major. “I don’t have a printer and I also come to the library for a quiet place to work.”
For now, Tolin is handling the cuts.

“I think the cuts so far are manageable,” Tolin said. “We are losing some electronic resources but we can get pretty much everything through the internet library.”