One of the major casualties of the Fiscal Year (FY) 2002 state budget war is the State Library allocation. The twenty-nine institutions that are funded through the Educational Reference Materials (ERM) line item (which includes the five state university libraries), have had their annual appropriation cut from $14 million to $5 million.

The trickle-down impact on UMass Boston’s Healey Library resulting from this drastic cut to the ERM – which accounts for ninety-eight percent of the UMB library’s materials expenditures – looks to be devastating.

The UMB library, which receives the second largest share of the EMR money (Amherst gets the most), has seen the budget for reference material plummet from $1,365,000 last year, to $488,800 this year. And what has compounded the problem is the delay, until late November, in the passing of the Massachusetts state budget for FY 2002 (which began July 1, 2001) As a result, the library has received – and already committed –