The following is a report of library activities and developments during the past six months.
The Canadian National Site Licensing Project (CNSLP) is a collaborative initiative of sixty-four universities in Canada, designed to test the concept of licensing electronic scholarly publications on a national basis.
The products licensed by CNSLP proved to be excellent choices for Waterloo. During 2001, the cost of renewing the subscriptions to the titles would have been well over $500,000. The cost to UW for participation in CNSLP, that is, the ‘matching funding' that comes from the Library’s acquisitions budget, is just over $250,000. Therefore, through the combination of Canada Foundation for Innovation funding and the excellent deals made by the CNSLP steering committee, we are able to provide the increased content for less than half the renewal cost of the products as previously purchased.
Comments from library users indicate that they are delighted with the very large amount of material available at their desktop.
The Library will be cancelling the print of the Institute of Physics (IOP), Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), American Chemical Society (ACS), and Springer titles. The print subscriptions to Academic Press journals were cancelled last year. These publishers have moved to an increasingly popular pricing model that is based on the electronic product, with print as an add-on. Where we see that happening for stable, reliable products with appropriate license agreements, we will not duplicate content.
Scholarly publishing is undergoing an unprecedented transition from print to electronic as the primary forum for publication. Full text electronic journals (ejournals) at the University of Waterloo have grown from 600 journals in 1997 to nearly 6,000 journals in 2001. Today, much of the Library's current journal collection is available electronically. To help users quickly locate titles of interest, a team of librarians from Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier, and the University of Guelph has recently redesigned the Ejournals Web site.
The move to the Internet for scholarly publishing has changed the way in which library collections are developed. While a single institution on a single title basis has traditionally purchased print journals, purchasing of large bundles of ejournals is becoming the norm. Bundles may include the entire publisher's output or packages of journals and other materials produced by a publisher. Recent acquisitions include:
The IEEE / IEE Electronic Library (Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers / Institution of Electrical Engineers) - a rich resource that includes all conference proceedings and standards produced by the societies in addition to all the journals.
BioOne - a unique aggregation of approximately 40 bioscience research journals focusing on the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences.
In August, a major upgrade to TRELLIS, the Library's catalogue, was completed without incident. The newer version offers more customization options and short cuts.
The Library has established an electronic reserve reading service. This service essentially provides students 24-hour access to reserve reading material.
The types of materials that will be available electronically are:
Materials created by instructors/teaching assistants for a course (assignment solutions, lecture notes, etc.).
Materials for which the instructor has sought and can provide copyright permission to have mounted electronically.
Specific articles contained in electronic journals for which the Library has subscriptions and the license permits us to link to the articles they contain.
Students and faculty members can now connect to the Internet on their own laptops in the Library. There are eight connections in the Dana Porter Library, eight in the Davis Centre Library, and two in the University Map and Design Library. Access to the connections is limited to members of the UW community; to use a connection, people must log on using their UWdir userid and a password.
The micro collection contains more than one million items, including newspapers, government documents, patents, theses, a large collection of early Canadiana, and business reports. In an effort to make this information user friendly and more readily available, the Library started offering printing at no charge for a one-year trial. To improve and encourage access despite the awkwardness of microfilm reading machines, free printing from microform items is now a permanent feature. We expect that there will be about 60,000 copies made this year.
The first issue of the Library’s new e-publication, news @ your library was published on September 11. The purpose of the publication is to keep the campus community informed about new resources, services, and current issues facing the Library. We expect to publish two issues per month.
In collaboration with Professor Carolyn McGregor in Systems Design engineering, the Library is undertaking a usability study of its home web page to identify ways to make the page a more effective gateway to the vast amount of information included in the Library's web site. The revised page will also incorporate design features consistent with the overall look being adopted campus-wide.
In March 2001 the Library participated in a pilot project designed to further test a web-based survey instrument known as LibQUAL+. Researchers affiliated with the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Texas A&M University Libraries are developing the instrument, intended to measure user satisfaction with Library services; our participation in the pilot project included administering the survey to UW students and faculty members. We recently received the survey results and are beginning to review and analyze them.
On September 6, 23 UW librarians attended a daylong workshop on campus to learn more about the "Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education" developed by the Associated of College and Research Libraries. Jo Anne Carr, a senior librarian at the University of Wisconsin Madison, led the workshop. During the workshop, librarians considered ways to foster integration of the Standards into the curriculum through collaboration with faculty members and administrators.
Almost 25 years to the day since its official opening in 1976, the multi-year renovation of the Doris Lewis Rare Book Room was completed and the staff and public areas were re-located to a larger and enhanced facility on the first floor of the Porter Library.
Beginning in 1993 and acting upon the recommendations of a student-faculty-librarian Task Force convened to address issues relating to space allocation in the Porter Library, the first stage of the re-configuration was the installation of a large environmental control unit designed to provide a physically stable climate for the rare book and archive collections. The collections were moved to the newly created space on the first floor over the next several years as each new installation of compact mobile shelving was acquired and put in place.
Designed to nearly double the shelve space available for fragile rare book and archival materials, the mobile shelving units now occupy almost the entire stacks and storage area and provide secure and efficient housing for these valuable research materials. The final stage of the phase implementation program took place in September 2001 when the reception area, staff work area and reading room were moved to the east side of the first floor of the Porter Library. The new reading room provides large research and consultation tables as well as ergonomically designed seating in a secure, quiet and comfortable area for researchers to consult items retrieved from the department's collections. The enlarged adjacent staff work area, separated from the reading room by a glass wall, enables staff to monitor activity in the room reading. Proximity to researchers also facilitates the in-depth consultation and assistance by staff with researchers using a variety of primary source materials. The reading room also contains public access terminals, display areas, and will serve as a reception area for Library and University functions.
Murray Shepherd
University Librarian
University of Waterloo Library
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
519 888 4883
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