VOL. 23, NO. 12	JANUARY 23, 1998

  Sen. Letty Moss-Salentijn, chair of education, said her committee had read the external review of the libraries now known as the Frye report, as well as other relevant documents, and had met with Elaine Sloan, vice president for information services and University librarian, to discuss the action plan that had been released on Nov. 24.

  She said that libraries and information systems were at the core of the University's research and teaching missions, and therefore understandably stirred strong feelings, but the committee's goal was rational discussion. She expressed support for the action plan, and called on the administration to give it the highest priority.

  She also stated the committee's most serious concerns about the libraries—staffing levels, shelving, library hours and modem access to the internet.

  Sen. William Harris, chairman of the Libraries committee, expressed qualified optimism about recent efforts, including the first meeting of a special provostial committee earlier that day. He said the Senate committee would be preparing a response to the action plan. To give an idea of the scale of the budget increases that might be needed, he said Columbia would have to increase its current annual allotment to its libraries by $17 million to match the fraction of total annual operating budget that Yale devotes to its libraries. Harris stressed that he was not questioning the commitment of any administrator to solving the problems of the libraries, which he said were long-term problems, requiring long-term solutions.

  Sen. Jeremy Waldron (tenured, Law), speaker for the Libraries Committee, said the main challenge with the 75-page document was grasping its relationship to the sense of crisis that elicited it.

  He said that the order of its priorities was not entirely clear, and that its proposals needed to be related point by point with the 13 recommendations of the Frye report. He pointed out that at least five of those recommendations were not addressed at all, and suggested that there should at least be an explanation for such decisions.

  Waldron expressed confidence that attention to the action plan in several Senate forums could help to accomplish the needed refinements.

  President George Rupp said that large increases in the budget of the libraries would require difficult decisions about priorities, and major adjustments elsewhere in the University budget.

  Eben Moglen, chairman of faculty affairs, said the action plan was a major step forward, but criticized its response to the problems of off-site storage, reference desk staffing and the need to merge data and voice communications. He also questioned the fiscal wisdom of other University projects, including Biosphere 2 and the cafe in the lobby of Dodge Hall.

  Moglen stressed that the Senate, in weighing solutions to the problems of the libraries, would have to focus on large issues of resource allocation during the spring term.