WHEREAS the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) serves libraries at 39 public higher
education institutions and 30 private, non-profit institutions by providing online access to high quality information
collections and promoting resource sharing among academic libraries in Virginia; and
WHEREAS the Virginia Department of Planning and Budget in its Instructions for Submitting Contingent Budget
Reduction Plans for the 2002-2004 Biennium asks agencies to "Focus on overall savings to the state. Do not
propose reduction strategies for your agency that would increase costs for other agencies. This does not result
in overall savings to the Commonwealth." and
WHEREAS VIVA provides equitable, cooperative and cost-effective access to library
and information resources for higher education across the Commonwealth in a manner that expands online access to
information, further supports distance education, enhances research competitiveness, and reduces costs on individual
campuses; and
WHEREAS VIVA subsidizes interlibrary loans, enabling each school in the Commonwealth to take advantage of
combined library collections that include millions of volumes acquired over a period of hundreds of years; more
than 60% of items borrowed by Virginia libraries in 2001 were loaned by VIVA academic libraries; and
WHEREAS additional budget cuts will seriously degrade and further erode the level of resource parity among
public higher educational institutions in the Commonwealth, restricting the opportunity for hundreds of thousands
of students and faculty to take advantage of high quality print and electronic information sources now provided
by VIVA; and
WHEREAS the Library Advisory Committee finds, and has documented, that further reductions to the Virtual Library of Virginia budget will result in disproportionate cost increases to academic library budgets throughout Virginia; and
WHEREAS it is the obligation of the Library Advisory Committee to advise the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia regarding academic library issues.
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that it is the position of the SCHEV Library Advisory Committee that the VIVA
budget should not be cut because additional cuts will not result in overall savings to the Commonwealth and will
instead, result in dramatically increased costs to individual academic library budgets across the state.
The SCHEV Library
Advisory Committee is composed of library directors from all 15 public comprehensive
and doctoral institutions in Virginia and representatives from directors of community and two-year colleges and
private, non-profit academic libraries.
This resolution was approved unanimously at the meeting of the Library Advisory Committee of the State Council
for Higher Education for Virginia held at Mary Washington College, in Fredericksburg, VA on September 13, 2002.