Balamb Garden is filled with good opportunities for people-watching that change over the course of the game. But there’s one scene in particular that has stuck with me.
After your test in the Fire Cavern at the start of the game, you can pop into the Balamb Garden library and eavesdrop on the staff. What follows is—perhaps unintentionally—one of the most brutal portrayals of library work in all of pop culture.
Let me tell you about working in an academic library.
Yes, our budget was always being cut. And yes, the first thing that got cut was our minuscule food budget, meaning we could no longer afford to get pizza for our student staff once a semester, which did affect staff morale. But the part you might not expect is that the part about having a separate budget to buy books is also correct.
In academic libraries, there’s a lot of emphasis on having collections for faculty members doing research. And increasingly, when we talk about collections, it’s not about physical books. It’s about digital access to academic journals, ebooks, streaming films, and so on. The catch is that libraries don’t usually own digital content, the same way they can purchase a book and put it on a shelf. They subscribe to digital collections and pay an annual price for access. Sometimes the cost is even based on how often the content is used.
Libraries AND library users both love the benefits of digital content, but it’s had a pretty serious impact on how library budgets work. See, instead of paying once for a book, libraries now have to subscribe to a book and pay for it over and over, for as long as they want people to keep accessing it.
Digital publishers have realized they have libraries over a barrel on this one. If a university wants to be a well-regarded research institution, it needs to have strong collections. So if publishers start raising their prices, there’s not much libraries can do about it! Some major publishers have also started bundling their ebooks and journals together, so you can’t just subscribe to one journal, you have to get dozens of them together and pay an inflated price.
This hot topic is called the “serials crisis,” because serialized publications (like academic journals) are at risk of absolutely wrecking library budgets. Meanwhile, academic publishers continue to rake in massive profit margins.
To get back on topic: Whenever another wave of budget cuts came through, we were told that cuts to the collections budget were off the table—and in fact, the collections budget would actually be growing year-over-year! To the credit of our management, they avoided laying people off at all costs, but it meant that our budget cuts had to come from elsewhere. Reduced staffing, replacing equipment less often, fewer opportunities for professional development, and yes, cutting the snacks budget.
The Balamb Garden library committee was dead-on. There will always be money for books and never money for the people who manage them. And also that all the savings from library cuts go to the disciplinary committee for some reason.