The Empire Page

Background:  Among the large number of constituency organizations concerned about the impact of the global financial crisis on New York is the NYS Higher Education Initiative.  We asked their executive director Jason Kramer to help us understand their point of view on the issues his members are facing.

Q:  Tell us about the NYS Higher Education Initiative. What led to its formation?
   
A; NYSHEI is the association for the public and private academic and research libraries of New York State.

The idea, initially hatched by former SUNY Provost Peter Salins, was to develop a collaborative public-private partnership to realize the vast educational, economic and research potential of one of New York’s greatest assets.

New York State is home to the largest state university system in the nation, the largest city-based public university system in the nation and the largest collection of private colleges and universities in the nation.  NYSHEI’s mission is to use this asset – specifically its information resources – to strengthen New York as an innovative leader in research and business.

Q:  Who belongs to NYSHEI?

A; Our membership includes all SUNY and CUNY libraries, the New York State Library, New York Public Library, the library of the United States Military Academy at West Point, and most independent institutions including leading universities such as Cornell, Columbia, Syracuse and NYU and places of national renown like the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Academy of Medicine.

Among our 137 member institutions are medical schools, law schools, state agencies, community colleges, and many more. 

Q:  What does NYSHEI do?

A: NYSHEI is a membership organization.  Our work is to put our vast academic and research potentiality in the mind of policy makers. 

We do have a number of specific member benefits, like the pursuit of consortial pricing discounts from publishers, programs and events.  But our real work is to provide a voice for the academic and research libraries of the state. 

These libraries play a vital role in teaching, learning and research, and thereby provide a critical support for economic and workforce development.  A biochemist a Siena College said it best when she told me that “library resources are as critical a tool as computers and lab space.”  Without those information resources, New York innovators – student, teacher or entrepreneur – cannot connect to the global community of scholars.

What escapes most people is the fact that quality, peer-reviewed scholarship is not freely available.  Tools like Google do not provide access.  Cutting edge information resources, particularly from the fields of science, technology, engineering and medicine, are available only through research libraries willing and able to spend the tens of thousands of dollars needed to obtain them.  To understand scope, know that NYSHEI libraries spend around half a billion dollars annually to provide information.

NYSHEI believes New York could, and should, use these resources to create a statewide information infrastructure provides students, faculty, entrepreneurs, researchers and small businesses with access to world-leading research.  Many other states have already taken this innovative step.  Today, despite its obvious advantage, New York is falling behind states from New Jersey to Georgia.

Q:  How has the current world financial situation impacted your member institutions?

A: With such broad membership, there is great variance among NYSHEI institutions.  I fear that the full impact will not be wholly appreciated for some time.

Q:  How would the cuts being discussed in Albany impact your member institutions?

A: State actions have a more immediate and deeper impact.  Certainly cuts at SUNY and CUNY are easiest to appreciate, but the independents are also feeling an impact.

Cuts threaten to reduce collections and access.  This of course hinders research, may place some programs in jeopardy, and obstructs the technology transfer process – from the pursuit of research grants to the application of licensed innovations.

The salient point is that library resources are not free.

The trauma in our state budget is the result of two things, profligate spending and reliance on an out-dated economy.  Our proposal supports smarter spending and an innovation economy.

Governor Paterson is aggressively moving to reign in state spending.  While cuts may stop the bleeding, they do not necessarily restore our economic health.

Failure to modernize our economy is having profound effects.  Upstate we have experienced the collapse of the manufacturing sector.  The current condition of our upstate cities, and the decay in many small communities, is a tragic fact. 

Downstate, well-intentioned federal government tweaking of real estate markets has hastened a stunning implosion of the finance and insurance sectors.  Wall streets woes now burden us all.

The utter denigration of the once powerful FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) economy means that we must now endeavor to erect New York’s sleeping giant, what is alternately known as the ICE (intellectual, cultural, educational) economy.

Using our ICE resources – which we have in abundance – we can build a better New York, rising like a phoenix from the FIRE.  With a small spark, we can reignite our state and thereby maximize the state’s great asset in an innovative fashion for the benefit of all – in every corner of the Empire State.

We have a proposal, the Academic Research Information Access (ARIA) act.  ARIA would create a statewide network that would put more electronic information resources in the academic and research libraries, while providing desktop access to small businesses, innovators and other entrepreneurs.   I think of ARIA like an electronic Erie Canal.  Instead of wildly expanding market commerce as the canal did, ARIA is the infrastructure that would unleash innovation across our state.

Q: What message would you like to get across to the readers of the Empire Page about the state’s academic libraries?

A: Full utilization of the public and private academic and research libraries of the state can revive our economy. 

Unfortunately, without a coordinated approach with state leadership, a recognized solution is being ignored.

In 2006, the director of NYSTAR said that “universities are situated in the crossroads of research, education and innovation.  It is vital that knowledge flows from universities into business and society.”

In 2007, the A.T. Kearney Report commissioned by Empire State Development stated that New York needs a “unified statewide economic growth engine fueled by the development of a high-technology infrastructure.  Such an infrastructure can be created through the combined efforts of the state, ESD, businesses, investors and the academic and research communities.”

In 2008, the National Governor’s Association, in association with the Pew Center on the States, issued a report on innovation that declared that successful states must “develop a statewide research and innovation strategy” that makes wise investments (as opposed to massive investments) and develops the states pre-existing strengths.

Unquestionably, New York must grapple with a dire fiscal situation.  However, forward-looking state leadership is needed for full recovery.  In recent years the state has made an enormous commitment to economic development and academic-industry partnerships.  Those efforts, and those millions of dollars already invested, cannot be maximized without a critical information infrastructure.

NYSHEI libraries have the raw materials for an information age economy.  We now need state leadership to exert their full benefit.