by Mike Weber
Daily Lobo
UNM administrators fear $330,000 a year will not be enough to keep UNM's Iberian and Latin American library collection at the high national ranking it's held for decades.
University Libraries Dean Camila Alire, Zimmerman Library acting director Johann van Reenen and new Latin American and Iberian Institute director Cynthia Radding all say they have plans for boosting the collection's funds.
The four main-campus libraries hold 450,000 books and bound serials from Latin America, Spain and Portugal - 21 percent of their total holdings.
"Certainly we're among the top 10 collections of U.S. academic libraries, both public and private," said Russ Davidson, Iberian and Latin American curator for the University Libraries.
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In the past few years, the collection has not ranked lower than third among reporting libraries in the amount of funding, Davidson said.
Last year, $281,000, or 7 percent of the libraries' acquisitions budget, was devoted to the region. Davidson said his office was "bailed out by another $50,000 in gift and bond money," and with the total $330,000, purchased serials, databases, about 2,000 literary books and at least 4,200 nonfiction books.
Information on the latest public policy ideas, government actions, education and training initiatives, business and trade news and scientific and medical advances in Latin America can be found in the collection.
Davidson said the University libraries are a national resource in the fields of Latin American art, architecture and photography. Through the Internet, Davidson said UNM's collection is used across the United States, the hemisphere and Europe.
Professor Claudia Isaac, director of Latin American studies at UNM, said the librarians do extraordinary work with limited resources. But it's important for the central administration to recognize the centrality of Latin American scholarship in all branches of the library in its budgeting process, she said.
Linda Lewis, the administrator who divides up the University Libraries' $4.1 million budget for new books, serials and databases, said they constantly wrestle with whether the collection is getting a fair share of the budget.
"We've tried to protect it as best we can," she said.
Davidson said the weakening of the dollar has impacted the budget considerably. In the past two years, the price of the average history book the libraries purchased from Spain more than doubled from $22 to $46, Davidson said, and he cut back his purchases from 314 to 146.
