The Library significantly increased its electronic holdings last year, adding electronic access to many print journals as well as to journals not available in print at Waterloo.
Students, professors, and researchers now have access to over 5,000 full-text electronic journals. One recent acquisition, Project Muse, is fast becoming a primary electronic resource for researchers in the Faculty of Arts. Project Muse provides electronic access to over 100 social science, arts, and humanities journals previously available to Waterloo researchers only in print. Support from alumni enabled us to purchase this resource.
Other recent electronic acquisitions include licensed access to three geospatial datasets that provide a wealth of geographic information about the Regional Municipality of Waterloo; the Grand River Valley Watershed and Toronto; and the CD-ROM version of Stith Thompson's Motif-Index to Folk Literature, a classic resource in the study of folklore.
In addition to electronic acquisitions, 71,262 items were added to the Library's collection, including books, periodicals, newspapers, microfiche, microfilm, maps, and aerial photographs. Award-winning author Eric McCormack donated his papers and archives to the Doris Lewis Rare Book Room, strengthening research resources for students of literary studies. Another generous member of the university community, Waterloo's Chancellor Valentine O'Donovan, donated an extraordinary document: a first-hand account of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham written by Rear-Admiral Charles Holmes.
The Library is home to a collection of papers and memoirs of historical significance valued in the millions of dollars, notes University of Waterloo President David Johnston, but such resources are "of inestimably greater value to students and other researchers for whom they give a real sense of past events you won't find in a textbook."
In the past year, donors have helped support ongoing subscriptions to such electronic resources as CompendexWeb, used by Engineering students and researchers to search the contents of all engineering journals in both electronic and print formats, and Biological Sciences, a web-based resource that allows students in Science, Kinesiology, Health Studies, and Environmental Studies to conduct literature searches on specific topics.
Acquisitions expenditures rose in 1999/2000 to $6 million. Expenditures on electronic resources increased enormously and now account for approximately 20% of library resources expenditures. Serials remain the largest library expenditure ($3,470,503 or 57%).
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