[LINK] "Dropping loonies squeezes library budgets as costs for materials climb"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Philip Moscovitch reports on how the falling Canadian dollar has hit libraries in Canada hard.

Every morning, Tom Hickerson turns on the TV and checks for the day’s exchange rate.

He is not a trader, banker or economist. But still, what he sees will have a major impact on the day ahead of him.

As the head librarian at the University of Calgary, Mr. Hickerson has watched in horror over the past two years, as the dropping dollar eats into his library’s purchasing power. Every drop of a penny against the American dollar takes a bite of over $100,000 out of his acquisitions budget.

The fall of the loonie – from just over 94 cents in early January, 2014, to the low 70s today – has left academic and public libraries with less money to pay for the increasing number of materials they are billed for in U.S. dollars.

Public libraries have made much of their transformation into digital hubs. In addition to allowing customers to download e-books and audiobooks, some also offer music and film streaming, as well as digital subscriptions to magazines like the New Yorker.

But these services all originate with American vendors – and when the Canadian dollar drops, the libraries’ costs go up.

Vickery Bowles, city librarian for the Toronto Public Library, said her institution spent nearly $1-million on currency conversion in 2015, out of a collections budget of $18-million. In 2010, the figure was $58,000. Most of those costs were for digital content. “That’s a huge difference and takes a real bite out of our collections budget,” she said.