Annual Report
Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library, Gustavus Adolphus College

A Collage of Recovery

Introduction

Looking Back

Fall Semester /January Term / Spring Semester

Progress and Goals

Collections /Staff / Services, Technology, Facilities / Budget

Looking Forward

Appendix A: Statistical Profile

Appendix B: Selected Staff Activities

Appendix C: Summary of Strategic Plan Progress and Goals
 
 

A Collage of Recovery
The books are taken off the shelf and shrink-wrapped in bundles.	Shrink-wrapped bundles are loaded onto pallets to be shifted.
Some books are moved on wooden "gondolas." Eventually the shrink-wrapped books are tucked away in corners while the carpet is laid.	Books are stacked in every available nook and cranny.
Two stack movers are used to lift and reposition entire ranges.	Gustavus Library Associates volunteer to help with the move!
The floor is cleared so new carpet can be laid. What a lot of space!	The ceiling panels are painted.
Rolls of carpet are brought in through the window. . .	. . . and laid.   . . . And when it’s all ready, the shelves are repositioned in their new locations, the shrink-wrapped books are all found and put back in their new locations, and by the time classes resume we are ready for the new year to start . . . if not ready for a long vacation! Custodians and library staff celebrate the end of a long haul with a gathering at Stoney’s thanks to a thoughtful gift of cheer from Hope College, reminding us of the old saying: dum spiro, spero.

This year by all accounts was much longer than average. The activities of the summer alone seemed to be enough to fill twelve months with some left over. It seems so long ago now that at its annual end-of-year retreat the library staff struggled to remember the details of the summer of rebuilding, working against the clock to move every book, shelf, and stick of furniture and put it back in a different place. After celebrating the library’s 25^th anniversary last year, we are starting our next 25 with an almost new library and so far the reviews have been positive.

We’ve made great strides toward meeting our strategic planning goals in the areas of facilities and technology this year. We’ve made some progress in other areas as well, but there is much still to be done and always unanticipated challenges. We reviewed our strategic plan at our retreat and set goals for next year. In fact, it looks as if next year could be even longer.
 
 

The summer of rebuilding was a busy one. Fortunately we had already developed a well thought-out plan for reorganization of the library formulated by a couple of library committees after much work. With that in hand, and knowing we would have to move everything to recarpet the library, we made the most of the opportunity and put everything back in a new arrangement. The major changes involved creating additional reading spaces, putting the book collection in order on two floors, relocating the reference collection, integrating Interior Department documents with the rest of Government Documents collection, and putting all periodicals on the first floor, with bound periodicals in a single sequence. We also took advantage of the rebuilding to rework some office spaces, creating a new interlibrary loan and reference office, new quarters for periodicals and government documents, and adding a room for a new electronic classroom on the main floor.

Moving a quarter of a million volumes entailed taking all of the books off the shelf, shrink-wrapping them in bundles, labeling them so they wouldn’t get out of order, loading them on colorfully-named "gondolas" (shelves on wheels) or onto wooden pallets and then moving them into every nook and cranny. Then shelving had to be either disassembled if it was moving from one floor to another or moved by means of a stacks mover, an ingenious gadget that can lift an entire range at once and relocate it. With Sandee Georgacarakos and Jay Nordstrom spearheading the efforts, the library staff, student employees, several food service employees on loan to us for the summer, many temporary workers hired to help with storm recovery, and even volunteers from the Gustavus Library Associates took the million different steps that were needed to move, store, find, and relocate all of the library’s collections. Though the library stacks were not open to the public for most of the summer, we managed to maintain services such as Interlibrary Loan, though the operation had to be relocated for the duration to Technical Services.

The music library posed special problems. Because the Fine Arts building had sustained such serious damage, the music library shared quarters throughout the summer with the main library’s audio visual department. Many of the collections were packed away and inaccessible for months and damage to scores and records was substantially worse than in the main library. A large number of scores had to be replaced, and around 350 records had to be cleaned and put into new jackets, something Kelly Francek did with record-breaking speed.

Each day brought new problems to solve and even, on occasion, disasters. A storm clocked at the nearby radio station with winds over 100 miles per hour hit in July just as workers were struggling to replace a window on the third floor. They were forced to retreat as tornado sirens sounded and, with that window pane missing, around 2,000 books got drenched by the heavy, driving rain while staff sheltered in the dark in the basement staff room. The wet books were quickly spread out to dry and then were packed for shipment to Forth Worth, Texas to be freeze dried, so the losses were minimal.
 
 

In September the library reopened with our new floor plan, new offices, a new classroom space (unfurnished) and a lack of chairs. The new chairs arrived in September and October and by the spring term we had conjured up sixteen new computers and enough borrowed banquet tables to hold them. Eventually we had an almost fully-furnished library, including special furnishings for the Hasselquist Room and replacement furniture and cabinetry for the Heritage Room. In order to clear out the clutter in the Special Collections Room, the Bible collection was placed in glass-fronted cases near the Archives. New shelving is under construction for the Special Collections Room to give it a more spacious and attractive look as we evaluate the collections.

The library drafted an assessment plan that we will use to guide our inquiry into the ways in which the library affects student outcomes. This plan, designed to prepare us for our next accreditation, is our attempt to address the difficult, qualitative questions that, though hard to answer, tie the library’s mission directly to student learning. Academic libraries are wrestling with the need for new measures of quality and effectiveness; this new plan was developed in the same year that the Association of College and Research Libraries drafted new Standards for College Libraries that address many of the same qualitative issues. We will be sharing our experiences with other colleges addressing the same issues.

During the fall semester two committees were formed to evaluate subscriptions. One group made our annual review of new periodicals requests and a second group assessed all of our continuations—book and electronic series that we receive on a subscriptions basis—for the first time in memory. In consultation with faculty we added several periodical subscriptions and were able to cancel around $12,000 worth of unneeded or redundant continuations. This seemed particularly pressing as new electronic materials come online on a constant basis. This savings will help offset the increasing costs in that budget line.

We also held a book sale jointly with the Friends of the St. Peter Public Library in the new (and, at that time, still unfurnished) electronic classroom. Members of the Gustavus Library Associates assisted in the monster sale that filled the room to the seams with second-hand books. Hundreds of books found new homes and at the annual St. Lucia luncheon the St. Peter Friends were presented with a check for nearly $2,000 to help them rebuild the collection that was largely destroyed in the tornado.

One of the tasks we faced this fall was documenting our losses for the college insurance claim. In addition to furniture and equipment losses, we lost around 475 books, over 100 scores, a large number of bound and loose issues of 41 periodicals, and a handful of videos. Though we reported the losses we knew of in November, we continued to discover losses of books that were in circulation at the time of the storm as people reported them to us throughout the year. All in all, however, the damage to the collection was surprisingly small considering the magnitude of the damage to the building. The college’s advance disaster planning and the quick work of recovery experts did much to minimize the problem.

The library marked their own moment of completing the arduous work of storm recovery by dining at Stoney’s in December with friends and custodial staff that had labored heroically in the library after the disaster. The celebration was made possible through a touching gift from the staff of the Van Wylen Library of Hope College in Holland Michigan who sent us the proceeds of their annual book sale with the instructions to treat ourselves to a party. They had been through a disaster of their own and knew how taxing to the spirit recovery can be. It was a thoughtful gesture that lifted our spirits.

In January two librarians were relieved of reference desk duty in order to pursue a complete redesign of our library web pages. Don Zhou and Sandy Fuhr created new content, a new look, and useful features such as a site map and pages that detail available databases and resources by subject. In addition to the main pages, the library’s newly launched newsletter, Folke Lore, was made available on the web.

Also during January term, the new Maynard and Lorraine Hasselquist International Studies Room was dedicated, with three generations of Hassequists present for the celebration. The special room has proven very popular with students who like to study at the large, traditionally-flavored central table. Its design seems to foster quiet and serious study even though the room receives a lot of use.

In the spring, the attractive, albeit empty, new classroom proved irresistible and we reallocated enough of the library’s operational budget to purchase 16 new computers. We borrowed banquet tables from Physical Plant for the duration and in a couple of hours of manic activity staff from the IT department installed the equipment. We were teaching in it almost immediately. It proved enormously useful in research instruction to have enough machines to allow for intensive, hands-on workshops. When classes weren’t scheduled the room was available for student use and it was fully utilized many if not most hours that the library was open.

The opening of the new classroom coincided nicely with an ambitious trial of a database collection called FirstSearch. Students and faculty quickly grew attached to the free web access to dozens of database files, including Basic Biosis, PsychInfo, the ATLA religion database, GeoRef, and more. Though we had access to some of these databases previously, this trial and some cgi scripting provided by Don Zhou made it highly accessible. Although the trial can be considered a great success, OCLC has not come forth with a contract so we are still uncertain in what future form we will have these databases available; we hope to have selected databases available campus-wide by next fall. We also added the JSTOR project to our electronic holdings in March. This retrospective collection of core academic journals is a Mellon Foundation project that, until the tornado provided the opportunity, was out of our reach. Because of the substantial losses to our bound periodical collection, many of them irreplaceable, we were able to pay the hefty one-time fee for JSTOR with insurance money.

Maintaining the spirit and energy it takes to improve the library is a challenging task for a college and library that are long on efficiency but short on staff. In March Barbara Fister and Sandy Fuhr resubmitted a grant to the Institute for Museum and Library focusing on using the new classroom as a site for faculty development programs, hoping to make it easier for faculty to infuse research into their courses. A library committee drafted a new staff development policy to encourage a wider variety of options for staff learning and professional growth, and Mariangela Maguire of the Communication Studies Department met with staff on several occasions to work on improving our communication skills, helping us fine-tune the essential skills required for a collegial management structure.

Other projects completed in the spring include adding Project Muse and JSTOR periodicals holdings to our catalog, the barcoding of music scores, an important step towards bringing the music library fully online, the transferring of map collection records into a new database, and the fine-tuning of a periodicals database that now can generate a current periodicals list which will be kept up-to-date and includes the URLs and holdings of our growing online periodicals collection.

In the last week of the academic year, the library held their annual end-of-year retreat, reviewing the year’s accomplishments, measuring our progress against our strategic plan goals, and setting goals for the upcoming year. We also hosted a gathering for the staffs of the five liberal arts colleges in the state that are members of the Oberlin Group. We finished the year with wide-ranging discussion of instructional issues, the challenges posed by electronic collection opportunities, and the best ways in which liberal arts colleges can respond to the "information literacy" movement. With hours of free-flowing discussion and a good lunch we ended the year on a visionary note.
 
 

The library added 7,479 volumes to its collection this year, bringing the total to 260,758. We also added 603 audio visual items, 2,740 government documents, 1,294 maps, and an impossible-to-determine number of electronic materials. The titles included in electronic collections such as Lexis/Nexis fluctuate depending on their mercurial relationships with a host of content providers. Other collections such as Project Muse, JSTOR, and Ideal add titles on a steady basis. We have continued to migrate CD-ROM databases to web format as it becomes available. Handling the multitude of consortial contracts, new offerings, and mutating contents has become a new Gordian knot for libraries. We continue to select electronic materials using the guidelines we created for collection development in all formats. The library’s Electronic Resources Committee has made headway in finding ways to present our electronic holdings seamlessly to the user, through web pages, integration of URLs in the periodicals list, and through hotlinks in the catalog, but it is a work in progress.

Among the major acquisitions this year are some new reference works of note: the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Worldmark Encyclopedia of Cultures and Daily Life, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and American National Biography, the long-awaited update to the venerable Dictionary of American Biography. Electronic additions include MathSciNet, a web-accessible version of Mathematical Reviews and a web version of PsychInfo, the online Psychological Abstracts. JSTOR is a major addition to our periodicals collection. Not only does it allow for full text searching of the core journals it covers back to the first issue, it will give us the option of eventually getting rid of paper backfiles, giving us room for expanding collections without the expense of adding to the library. Our floor plan redesign was created with such eventual expansion in mind.

We spent several bimonthly meetings examining and evaluating the conspectus method of collection assessment. After looking at the literature and consulting with other liberal arts libraries we decided the method had promise but needed to be radically adapted to meet both our needs and the time we could realistically commit to it. Developing and implementing a locally-developed adaptation is a goal for next year. Another assessment effort this year was to provide reports for those departments under review. This proved so helpful to us as well as to the departments undergoing self study that we hope to tie cyclical examination of parts of our collection to the department review process. If we analyze our holdings relevant to those departments under review each year we will have completed a fairly thorough assessment of our holdings for all of the academic programs every ten years.

In terms of our goals outlined in the strategic plan, we have continued to develop our liaison program and made progress with assessment and weeding the collection. We did not make significant progress in increasing the percentage of college budget going to the library or in using all of our endowment growth for budget relief. However, we anticipate some budget growth in the endowed lines for this next fiscal year that will help with increased acquisitions costs.

We have always prided ourselves on having an unusually dedicated and accomplished support staff. They were certainly tested by the summer’s hard work and came through proving themselves beyond anyone’s imagining. The planning, consultation, troubleshooting, and sheer physical labor involved in the work accomplished in three short months was intense. We had the help of hardworking students, some quick studies on loan from the Dining Service, and a large number of temporary workers, but all of it took coordination and a vision of how the library should look. The majority of the work fell squarely on the shoulders of the paraprofessional staff, and they not only rose to the occasion, they continued their regular operations as they did so. It might be interpreted as a litmus test of our assumptions about the value of collegial management and teamwork. Certainly the advance work of committees made it possible to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the upheaval. And the shared vision that informed our strategic planning process provided the direction.

The library’s staff development committee invited Mariangela Maguire to spend some time with the staff discussing ways to communicate better. Her skillful and tactful assistance was much appreciated. The committee also drafted a new staff development policy designed to make the definition of "staff development" broader and to allow for more funding and more flexibility in the use of funds. A goal for next year will be compiling and maintaining a calendar of development opportunities. All staff took part in some development activities; a summary can be found in Appendix B.

We made some progress toward our goals in the strategic plan. We restored some of the staffing in the circulation area that had been cut, but we still lack any staff coverage of the late evening hours. During those hours, when the library is especially busy, the library is staffed entirely by student employees. We created a new policy to encourage staff development. We did not increase our staff size or make much progress on examining workload or staff parity issues. After spending some time working on these intractable problems, we arrived at the conclusion during the year-end retreat that it might be an effective strategy to invite a consultant to help us address them.

Many of our services have been favorably impacted by improvement in technology and facilities this year; in fact, they are categories hard to tease apart. It’s telling that the number of questions at the reference desk that were primarily about how to locate books and journals and how to make a computer or printer work declined from last year. The improvements in layout and technology upgrades are paying off.

The rearrangement of the library was essentially designed to improve service to library users. The integration of collections and the simplification of the shelving sequence was intended to eliminate some of the artificial barriers to successfully finding research materials, making it easier for students new to the library to intuitively and independently explore the place. The addition of lounge furniture in strategically placed clusters was intended to promote reading and study and to send the message that the library is a place for intellectual engagement with library materials, not just a convenient study hall.

Improvements in our technology infrastructure were all based on service needs and the greatest impact was in public areas. The decision to move the reference/interlibrary loan office and place a computer classroom/lab in a prominent place was based on the premise that computers are an increasingly necessary gateway to library resources and they should be placed where students can readily seek reference assistance. It has provided us a venue for much more effective instruction—simply having adequate hardware and enough of it to handle an average class size has given us much more opportunity to spend time on important things. We hope that faculty will make use of the room as they initiate students into the mysteries of research. And when it isn’t needed for instruction it is a popular place to work on research and writing. It has made an enormous impact—just a short while ago we were in the miserable position of having to send students to another building to access library materials.

The redesign of the web page (a parallel to the impulse to rework the floor plan in order to make the library easier to use) and the addition of many web-based resources has made it easier for students and faculty to use resources both in and outside the library. Teaching and using WebPals as an interface for our library catalog has helped new users find their way with relative ease.

Our new assessment plan was also designed to measure the impact of the library on student outcomes in ways that will help us get a better grip on how well our services are working. Although it is difficult to know which library service contributed to a successfully written paper or helped a student develop a curious habit of mind, it will give us insight into what exactly happens to students when they use our library.

This year we made some progress in assessing services and integrating instruction in the use of electronic resources into our programs. We put more information, including handouts for instruction workshops, on the web. Sandy Fuhr and Barbara Fister submitted a grant proposal that would support faculty development and exploration of effective ways research activities can be developed as part of the undergraduate curriculum. We did not, however, increase our instruction in terms of classes met or involvement in the FTS, nor have we made progress in developing more ways of making research instruction a valued part of the curriculum.

We’ve accomplished most of the recommendations in our strategic plan as far as facilities, but a few loose ends remain, and storage continues to be an issue, although the addition of the JSTOR journal collection will help with space needs.

This year we made great strides with our list of goals for technology. We have increased the wiring in the library so that laptop plug-in is available, with more on the way. We have improved our instructional spaces. We have prepared for the migration to a new statewide system and, although that migration has been delayed because no vendor has a product ready at this point, it allows us to use more PALS features and to provide access to web-based resources. We have a replacement cycle planned, although funding will remain an issue. This year we have had better relations with IT than previously; support has been improved in part because of having newer equipment that needed less work and in part because of a better understanding between the departments. One example of joint problem-solving has to do with our goal of finding ways to charge back printing costs. Our costs for paper and toner went up dramatically as we increased the number of good computers available to the public and IT agreed in the spring to take over the public printer, supplying paper and toner for it. The IT department will set policy on whether or not to charge for public printing, but it won’t adversely impact the library budget any longer. The faculty Information Infrastructure Advisory Committee has helped us present and clarify our IT needs campus-wide and involvement in discussions about establishing a new web coordinator position was another opportunity to make the campus aware of the essential nature of technology for the library. The accelerated pace of technology as an essential part of library service drove an accelerated timetable for meeting our strategic plan goals for technology, and this year most of them were addressed. What remains to be worked on is maintenance of the resources with attention to budgeting for replacements, and more training for library staff so that everyone has essential proficiencies.

We had a third year of flat funding, a dismaying trend given that costs for materials continually rise and we lose ground in our comparison colleges. In fact, although steps were taken to improve funding since the last North Central accreditation it leveled off and we are close to being in the same position comparatively as we were then. We rose from being last among libraries in the Oberlin Group in expenditures per student to being only third from the last, and are far below the 25^th quartile. This, of course, is highly inconsistent with our stated institutional goal of each of our programs ranking among the top 25 in the 168 national liberal arts colleges unless somehow academic support isn’t weighed in the ranking. Institutions that we like to think aren’t quite up to our standards such as Albion, Alma, Beloit, Coe, and Knox all spend more per student than we. If this trend continues we may be again in a dismal position when the next accreditation team comes.

The good news about budgeting this year is that we had more information and better ways of getting answers than ever before. Kelly Waldron, the new comptroller, was very helpful in providing us with analysis and information. The bad news was that as some changes were made we had some puzzles in our budget that led to some confusion. When we got our restricted line budget figures for the year arrived in October they were far lower than anticipated. A change in calculating yield was one aspect of the problem, and when we realized that, the finance office put funds in our budget to make up for the unexpected shortfall. The other issue had to do with rolled-over funds that we intended to use this year to make up for the lost ground in the previous year due to the tornado slowing our book orders. They were rolled over in the correct lines, but an equal amount was removed from our unrestricted lines. Essentially we lost nearly $40,000 of acquisitions budget.

Our complaints were heard, however, and we will not be flat funded in the coming year. For the first time in three years the unrestricted budget has not been cut to anticipate growth in the restricted lines. It won’t likely amount to a $40,000 increase, but it’s a step in the right direction. We hope that isn’t a rare event to address our unusual tornado year problem, but the beginning of a trend.

We will not lack for challenges in the next twelve months. Among our goals for the coming year are to finish the electronic classroom by obtaining appropriate furniture and a projection system, for which at this point funding is uncertain. We hope to foster the development and maintenance of a common baseline of technological knowledge for library staff, starting this summer with some web authoring workshops. And if our grant is successful we will plan faculty development and assessment programs in the event of our IMLS grant proposal being funded.

This summer we hope to update and maintain documentation for library resources in print and on the web page, part of an overall effort to improve the accessibility and visibility of our collections and services. We will strengthen our area studies collections by having each librarian responsible for strengthening the collection in a different geographic area. We will test some approval plans to see if we can make our collection development more efficient. Our academic assistant will work on a project in the fall to improve our understanding of student perspectives on the library and the role of research in the curriculum. We plan to invite departments to meet with us in the new classroom to examine new electronic resources and discuss the best ways to use these resources in the curriculum.

Among unfinished business, we will pursue the work started this year to develop a collection development assessment tool based on the Conspectus method. We will work on developing profiles with departments to help guide our collection building, trying to match our choices more intentionally with the curriculum. We will continue to develop new assessment tools for services focusing on student outcomes. We will continue to work on our review of special collections. And, as a follow-up to its work this year, the Staff Development Committee will create a calendar of development opportunities and will plan for a consultant to review library workload and parity issues.

No doubt one year will be too brief to accomplish all of these goals but in keeping with the loaves-and-fishes approach to resources that has led to our high efficiency ratings we will at least begin to tackle some of the intriguing issues that our library and all college libraries face in a rapidly changing world.
 
 
 
 

Appendix A: Statistical Profile
 

Ginny Bakke attended the Minndocs meeting, the Government Documents Spring Forum, and the Employee Enhancement Symposium at the University of Minnesota. She also was an ACES mentor and participated actively in several Gustavus Library Associates activities.

Lynn Burg attended PALS user group meetings and the Employee Enhancement Symposium at the University of Minnesota. She also worked with staff at the Nicollet County Historical Society to implement a grant-supported cataloging project.

Diane Christensen attended PALS user group meetings, the Success 1998

Workshop in Minneapolis, and the Employee Enhancement Symposium at the University of Minnesota.

Howard Cohrt, a master gardener, once again provided spectacular floral arrangements for the library. His award-winning dahlias attracted much notice.

Barbara Fister was an invited panelist on an ALA College Libraries Section program, "When Higher Education Becomes a Business, What Happens to Traditional Library Values" in June 1998 and was the keynote speaker at the ACM Bibliographic Instruction Conference, St. Olaf College, October 1998. She also published "Balancing the Trade-Offs: Pros and Cons of Library Technology," Library Issues 19.1 (September 1998) and contributed to new editions of Elements of Argument, A Writer’s Reference, and Research and Documentation Online, all published by Bedford Books.

Sandy Fuhr attended the ACM Bibliographic Instruction Conference at St. Olaf College, a Reference workshop at Minitex, and the Association of College and Research Libraries conference in Detroit. She was elected to the college Curriculum Committee and is a member of the Redwood Falls Public Library and Plum Creek Regional Library System boards.

Kelly Francek kept up with developments in the field through Internet discussion lists and professional reading.

Sandee Georgacarakos served as Webmaster for the Support Staff Interest Section of the Minnesota Library Association and planned the Summer 1999 Branch Out conference program.

Mike Haeuser attended the Midwest Archives Conference in Chicago. He is a member of the College Libraries Committee of the Council on Library and Information Resources; he helped to select and then visited and wrote case studies of college libraries that have used technological innovations to enhance services, the basis of a conference and published on the CLIR website.

Jan Jensen participated in the Gustavus-Skeriol Folkshogskola exchange program by teaching costume design at the Folkschool in Mora, Sweden.

Kathie Martin received the Outstanding Paraprofessional award from the Minnesota Library Association. She also participated in a focus group for a statewide Interlibrary Loan assessment and attended the Minnesota Library Association annual conference, a conference on the MnLINK Gateway at Minitex, and a conference on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and its effects on libraries as well as the Employee Enhancement Symposium at the University of Minnesota.

Dan Mollner was elected to the Faculty Senate and attended a variety of government documents meetings.

Jay Nordstrom served as secretary of the PALS Serial Subsystem group and was elected to serve as the group’s representative to the User Council. She also attended the Employee Enhancement Symposium at the University of Minnesota.

Sylvia Straub attended the Employee Enhancement Symposium at the University of Minnesota and the American Cancer Society Fall Conference in St. Paul; she continued to serve as co-facilitator of the Gustavus Cancer Support Group.

Don Zhou took courses on computer programming and taught a Chinese language course. He attended a Minitex workshop on the MnLINK gateway and served as a member of the PALS Authority Taskforce and the PALS Electronic Resources Cataloging Taskforce.
 
 

This review of our Strategic Planning goals was done at an all-staff retreat on May 26, 1999.

Done/Made Progress:

• Reversed trend toward cutting unrestricted lines to a limited extent
• Improvement in liaison program—departments spent their allocations earlier
• Some weeding accomplished

To Do/Goals:

• Weeding program linked to Department Reviews
• Build Area Studies collection through regional specialization
• Journal weeding (explore JSTOR potential)
• Continue with Electronic Resources work on access and evaluation

Done/Made Progress:

• Circulation position back to full time
• Updated Staff Development Policy, increased individual allocations

To Do/Goals:

• Continue to make the case for a Night Supervisor
• Explore workload issues with a consultant
• Monitor developing student employment issues
• Continue with communications discussion

Done/Made Progress:

• New classroom
• New web page design
• Folke Lore newsletter launched
• Maintained basic services during storm restoration
• Enhanced electronic databases: (Lexis-Nexis, Jstor, FirstSearch)
• Evaluation and assessment: Ideal review, use study, ILL stats comparison, FirstSearch user survey

To Do/Goals

• Finish classroom (more machines, projection, furniture)
• Maintain web pages
• Begin process of putting Government Documents online
• Make database of maps available online
• Continue review of Special Collections
• Establish better means of assessment for library services
• Improve public access/assessment and publicity
• Update Reference Resources guides

Done/Made Progress:

• Repaired entrance wall
• Painted ceiling tiles
• Replaced carpeting all three floors
• Replaced furniture in the public areas
• Air conditioned the music library
• Constructed new offices for Government Documents, Interlibrary Loan, and Reference
• New security gate
• Improved storage for library and archives
• New classroom for instruction

To Do/Goals:

• Finish adapting the reference desk to hide computer cables
• Finish constructing end panels for the security gate
• Replace/repair bathroom sinks, counters where needed
• Replace AV counter
• Investigate more storage options
• Carpeting staff room, circulation office, AV, and other areas that have old carpet

Done/Made progress:

• MNLink-ready computers--well on the way
• Improved machines for BI Lab
• New electronic classroom with 16 machines
• Established replacement cycle for computer hardware
• Wiring for plug-in laptop network access
• IT assumed responsibility for all public printers and costs.

To Do/Goals:

• Strongly encourage staff development in use of the technology on their desks (IT instruction classes and library specific classes)
• Better computer maintenance
• Evaluate cd-rom reference collection
• Keep up with replacement cycle