Losing Your Budget Without Losing Your Mind: Communicating in a Crisis

Managing a significant budget cut is always challenging for libraries. After years of flat budgets with reduced spending power, compounded with a large budget reduction brought on by a pandemic, this quickly becomes a crisis. While the logistics of determining the most essential parts of the collection to retain are important, communicating with faculty and ensuring transparency during this difficult process is even more so. The University of South Florida Libraries navigated these murky waters in the 2020/2021 fiscal year. This article provides a clearer understanding of our funding and collections criteria and details how we established a communication plan.