Reason minus zero/no limit: Trying to bring it back home

Negotiations connected with database renewals are sharply critical and ultimately impact renewal decisions. Today, academic libraries face an ever-consolidating marketplace, often accompanied by disruptive cost increases that toss sound reasoning aside. Instances of super-exponential cost increases transfigure once reasonable practices based on sound criteria to unsustainable subscriptions and inappropriate access models. Most troubling is that libraries have seldom been asked to participate in stakeholder discussions before these models and decisions were made. The paper reviews University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Libraries struggle with these changing metrics. In context, the paper looks at how recent political upheaval in Wisconsin has overturned Wisconsin’s progressive heritage and contributed to a rapid dismantling of state funding for public higher education and its’ associated services. Wisconsin has been known as a ‘laboratory for democracy’ with its’ Wisconsin Idea, publicly championing higher education’s mission and expertise in service of the common good. Times are changing. Today, not only does Wisconsin’s public higher education confront losses of state funding, it faces changing demographics, reduced FTE’s, all equating to even less budget dollars. In turn, budget shortfalls have made it nearly impossible to address declining infrastructures, needs for academic program reorganization and institutional restructuring, much less maintain and enhance existing services.