How Deep Is the Special-Collections Funding Gap?

p strongSpecial-collections funding is widely viewed as inadequate, and the shortage is affecting services&mdashnot merely slowing aspirational projects./strong/p p Primary Research Group's survey of 26 academic institutions found that only 19.23% were satisfied or very satisfied with current funding, while 50% were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. At institutions with more than 40,000 full-time-equivalent students, 66.67% were very dissatisfied. Scale does not automatically protect a department from resource pressure./p p Budget visibility is another problem. A total of 38.46% did not know what share of the total budget went to special collections, and 34.62% said the share was below 10%. Funding constraints had forced 38.46% to reduce services or programs, while another 26.92% said reductions had occurred to some extent. Staffing was ranked as the most severe shortage by 57.69%./p p Donor-designated funds can help, but they are not a substitute for predictable operations. Long-term processing, preservation and access commitments require stable support even when a grant or gift pays for an acquisition or launch. Leaders should separate recurring obligations from project costs and attach service consequences to each unfunded need./p p The persuasive budget case is specific: which backlog will grow, which service will shrink and which institutional objective will be missed. Benchmarking turns a general claim of underfunding into a comparison that campus leaders and donors can evaluate./p p  /p