ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

From Inside the DLSEF*

By KATHARINE M. STOKES

Before I came to this office from Kalamazoo on September 1, I was grateful but a bit mystified about college resources grants awarded to WMU in June by the Division of Library Services of the U.S. Office of Education under the Higher Education Act of 1965. Now that I have had an opportunity to examine the files of applications and the scoring sheets for the criteria requirements, I realize how very little I understood about the allocation of grants under Title IIA of the act. Just in case some of you were equally baffled by the amounts your schools received, let me recount my own experience.

For the basic grant of $5,000, of course, it was WMU’s second time around, so that application presented no problem. But the supplemental grants made my mouth water —“no matching requirements” and “in an amount not to exceed $10 for each full-time student.” Then I read about the special purpose grants, which required matching funds “equal to not less than 33⅓ per cent.” But most of WMU’s funds were already committed for the fiscal year. Besides, it was hard to understand the scoring information on special purpose grants, and phrases like “demonstrate a special need,” “meet special national or regional needs,” and “need special assistance in establishing and strengthening joint-use facilities” were difficult to interpret specifically.

* Room 5922, 7th & D Streets, S.W., if you have time to stop to see us when you come to Washington.

So I decided to concentrate on the supplemental grant, adding up the points I thought WMU would rate. Prospects looked pretty bleak for an institution that wasn’t less than five years old, called itself a university, and had just over three hundred thousand volumes. But multiplying our fulltime equivalent enrollment by the points the acquisition librarian and I thought we could claim still gave a sizable amount, for which we hopefully applied.

Last June someone in the office of the President of WMU called to say that we had received a supplemental grant but that it was less then the amount requested. If we had seen the form letter that went to the President’s office saying, "Because requests for supplemental grants exceeded funds available, such grants to eligible institutions were reduced by approximately 25 per cent,” we might have deduced that we weren’t allowed that debatable fifth point we hoped to receive for “special circumstances.” But the information in that letter to the President was never passed on to the library staff and it was only when I went to some meeting of librarians, and someone said, “There was only enough to cover 75 per cent of the requests,” that I got the message.

Actually, the formula for computing the grants was 75.736 per cent of the figure derived from multiplying the number of FTE students in an institution by the number of points scored. The supplemental grants for which all the institutions qualified were totaled and compared with the amount available after the basic and special purpose grants were awarded. The resulting percentage figure was a fraction over 75 per cent. Among the 1,266 institutions receiving supplemental grants, 309 scored 5 points. Only 5 institutions rated the highest of 10 points.

On July 14, 1967 a letter from the Division of Library Services and Educational Facilities was sent to presidents of higher education institutions having library education programs, asking for an expression of interest and intent to hold institutes in library and information science in the summer of 1968 and/or the academic year 1968/69. The manual and application form will be sent early in November to those few institutions responding with a mid- December deadline specified.

We hope other institutions will respond to this excellent opportunity.