Unless the General Assembly drastically changes its tune toward higher-education funding, one of the state’s most cutting-edge — and crucial, officials say — online educational resources will be gutted to the point of irrelevancy once the state budget is passed.

The Partnership Among South Carolina Academic Libraries (PASCAL) was established in 2004 as an online resource for higher education students and faculty with an annual appropriation of $2 million. It was designed as a strategic initiative to improve information access for South Carolina’s college students and was launched by cooperation from public and private academic libraries.

In a nutshell, PASCAL combines the electronic and print resources of all of the state’s university libraries into a one-stop online shop (pascalsc.org) where students can comb through articles from thousands of academic journals and check out books from any state university library, no matter where that student attends school.

However, PASCAL’s budget has been slashed some 90 percent, from $2 million in previous years to just $200,000 this year. The cuts have meant the loss of key online resources PASCAL offered, such as LexisNexis and Access Science, and the reduction of book delivery service from five to three days per week.

By the end of January, subscriptions to Nature, Science online and two nursing journals will expire, not to be renewed. Without drastically more funding, another 16 journals will drop from the rolls by the end of July.

“What PASCAL really does is level the playing field for all South Carolinians attending college,” says Ruth Riley, director of library services for the University of South Carolina School of Medicine and chairman of the PASCAL board of directors. “Any student at any university or college or technical school in the state has access to the combined libraries of 53 institutions of higher learning, which is an amazing service to our state because it lets someone at a small school have access to research-level collections.

“It also helps better utilize university libraries and collections because now everyone has access to them and they can be used more effectively. It’s an amazing program.”

It’s also a program on life support. Membership, dues and fees from participating institutions combine for about 16 percent of PASCAL’s operating budget. State dollars are used for database and electronic journal fees, which can be substantial. With just $200,000 appropriated this year, the massive reduction will mean drastic cutbacks and, possibly, the end of a system that has served taxpayers well.

According to figures from the S.C. Commission on Higher Education, in 2007-08 more than 50 higher education institutions paid $174,000 collectively to cover administrative costs, and in turn PASCAL spent $2.2 million on content for the schools. Since 2004, the Commission on Higher Education estimates that every dollar PASCAL has spent has returned about $7 in access to critical educational resources.

“One big thing PASCAL has been able to do over the years is to exercise the power of [group] purchasing,” Riley says. “With us able to represent the whole state, some 53 universities, we can go to the marketplace as a vendor and buy at a much more reduced price than institutions shouldering those expensive burdens alone.

“With that buying power, we get deep discounts. Without more funding from the Legislature, there’s only a few universities that can afford to get together and do that, so it weakens the buying power and reduces access to leading research information for all South Carolinians attending college.”

Julie Carullo is director of governmental affairs for the Commission on Higher Education. As a liaison for the CHE to the Legislature, Carullo says she doubts that funding for PASCAL will be found to match what’s needed.

“We’ve been funded previously through different means, through one-time, nonrecurring monies, so we knew there was always the possibility of losing funding from year to year,” Carullo says. “But a 90 percent reduction is very difficult, and given the current climate, I think it will be very difficult to get the funding we need to operate PASCAL; there is a chance it could die.”

Barring a miracle, however, most of its services will diminish significantly or vanish completely.

“With no more funding, we will lose all our databases for 2009-2010,” Riley says.

She says PASCAL helps build the economy of the future in South Carolina.

“Any investment in information resources is an investment that students and faculty can use for research and learning, which goes directly back to a knowledge-based economy.

You can’t be competitive in research without access to robust information resources because knowledge changes so rapidly, especially in the science and technology areas. It’s hard enough to compete in that economy without taking the tools away from students to do so.”