Western New Mexico University has a lot at stake on this November’s ballot. In addition to General Obligation Bond 3, which would fund the construction of a new Early Childhood Center for infants and toddlers, the university is also invested in General Obligation Bond 2, which benefits libraries statewide.
GO Bond 2 funding is designed to support supplemental library acquisitions, including books, equipment, electronic resources, collaborative library resources and information technology projects.
Bond 2 would provide approximately $19 million for public libraries, school libraries, tribal libraries and academic libraries. If it passes, $6 million would go to fund academic libraries across the state, according to Samantha Johnson, the director of WNMU J. Cloyd Miller Library. A portion of that money “would be spent on library databases purchased by a statewide consortium and available to all public higher education institutions in New Mexico,” said Johnson.
These databases are key to student and faculty research, giving researchers access to a wide range of scholarly content, including academic journals, conference proceedings, ebooks and technical reports. At present, the library subscribes to over 100 different databases, about 30 of which are funded by a previous GO Bond through the statewide consortium.
Johnson cited several databases in particular that she said are “essential to operating an academic library”: Academic Search, a multi-disciplinary database, CINAHL, which is used in nursing and allied health, and the Ebsco ebook collection, which contains over 200,000 titles.
Beyond the database subscriptions shared by all of the state’s academic libraries, Bond 2 would also fund additional acquisitions specific to Miller Library, which is slated to receive an individual allocation of over $173,000 if the bond passes.
Johnson emphasized that this funding is essential for Miller Library. “GO Bonds fund many of the library’s most costly databases and comprise the library’s entire book budget,” she said, “so it is absolutely critical to maintaining the current level of library service at Western New Mexico University.”