Both the Missouri Students Association and the Graduate Professional Council are continuing to consider a proposed student fee for the MU libraries.
Members from MSA and GPC met with library staff Tuesday to discuss the possibility of promoting a fee. The proposed fee would be $1 per credit hour per semester.
The group discussed what aspects of the libraries were most important to students and how to move forward with promoting a student fee.
For MSA, if legislation in support of a student fee passes in Senate, it would appear on the Fall 2012 MSA Presidential ballot for undergraduate students to vote.
MSA Academic Affairs chairman Ben Levin said he thinks the most important thing to undergraduate students is study space.
“MSA has done polling on library fees and it’s not been good,” he said. “Any student fee needs a majority vote of the student body, so any proposal to pass would need study space.”
At the Tuesday meeting, graduate and undergraduate students disagreed about what library services were most important. For graduate students, academic collections were a big factor in whether or not GPC supports the fee.
For MSA, study space and recreational reading materials were the big issues.
“A lot of times people just want to read books to get away from the world,” MSA Senator Matt Kalish said.
MU Libraries is experiencing a budget shortfall, MU Libraries Director Jim Cogswell said. Without the student fee, he said services will be cut.
“There is a good possibility that a lot of the things you value are going to be diminished,” he said to students Tuesday. “The choice is: Do you want to keep having your collections of books and hours of access or not?”
One of the major cuts would be to online journals and collections, which the members of GPC in attendance on Tuesday said was worrisome.
MSA senator Tyler Gill said students don’t understand all of the services their libraries provide them.
“I think that students take the library for granted,” he said. “They don’t understand that collections, they cost a lot of money.”
One of the strategies discussed to relate the student fee to students was to compare the cost of the fee to things they already buy.
“The fee would be the cost of one book,” said Ann Riley, associate director for Access, Collections and Technical Services for the MU Libraries.
For a student enrolled in 15 credit hours, the fee would cost $15 per semester.
In order to pass the student fee at the undergraduate level, MSA requires a vote of 50 percent or more from the total number of votes from the MU student population.
Cogswell said he thinks students don’t understand what they will lose if the student fee is not passed.
“The consequences are real and that’s what we have to get across to students,” he said.