Obligations and Intentions: An Exploratory Study of Indirect Cost Recovery Monies from Research Grants as a Revenue Stream for Funding Research Library Budgets

Many academic libraries continue to face budgetary pressures and financial constraints, necessitating an examination of how they meet stakeholder needs. Consequently, academic libraries have seen greater attention given to assessment and student learning. Practically speaking, this laudable focus on student needs also directly connects to primary revenue streams. At higher education institutions that receive research grants, a certain amount of those funds is explicitly designated through Indirect Cost Recovery (ICR) to go to library expenses. Since there are a limited number of ways that an academic library may receive monies, the fact that one of these revenue streams seems to have been almost completely unexplored in the library research literature is quite surprising.