Audrey Rynberg, Staff Photographer

The budget cuts at San Diego State have claimed another victim, as the library has had to eliminate its Electronic Course Reserves system.

The elimination of ECR is expected to save the library about $50,000 a year, according to Mark Stover, interim associate dean of Library and Information Access.

Stover said the cost to keep ECR included paying for two full-time staff members, new software and copyright costs, which was the most expensive. The $50,000 the library saved from eliminating ECR will now be primarily spent on the library’s electronic databases and electronic journals. Stover estimated that 10 percent of the classes taught every semester used the ECR system.

The decision to eliminate ECR was made by Jon Cawthorne, dean of Library and Information Access. The decision was made after a year of consulting with many people around campus.

“The idea grew out of severe budget cuts and really looking at services we could no longer support,” Cawthorne said in an e-mail.

History professor Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley had been using the ECR system for her students for six years. She would use ECR for her graduate seminar about Chinese history and for an upper division writing class through the history department. She said she is disappointed the ECR system will no longer be available to her students but understands the library’s budgetary decisions.

“I’m certainly not blaming the library. It’s the budget cuts. I understand that the library cannot afford it,” Edgerton-Tarpley said.

She said with the elimination of ECR, her students must now either buy an expensive course reader or get the readings on paper reserve in the library.

Stover said although ECR is no more, faculty members still have resources for their students to read materials electronically.

“We realized that the same kind of service that we were providing through ECR could be managed by individual faculty members themselves through their Blackboard sites,” Stover said. He also said Montezuma Publishing and Instructional Technology Services can help in aiding the faculty with publishing and electronic material.

Stover said the elimination of ECR is a sad loss for the library.

“We were actually one of the pioneers in using electronic reserves,” Stover said.

“I believe we were, if not the first, one of the very first university libraries to use ECR. So it’s a loss. It’s a sad thing in a way that we can’t provide this anymore. We were sort of like a trendsetter or pacesetter in that area.”

Before its elimination the library used the ECR system for about 15 years.