Introduction

Collections
The Current Situation
Recommendations

Staffing
The Current Situation
Recommendations

Services
The Current Situation
Recommendations

Facilities
The Current Situation
Recommendations

Technology
The Current Situation
Recommendations

Conclusion
Works Cited

Appendix A: Comparative Current Holdings

Appendix D: Summary of Recommendations

Many years ago Elizabeth Eisenstein made the claim that the printing press was a technological change agent that had profound social implications for early modern Europe. We are on the cusp of another such change and for the moment must live effectively in both print and electronic worlds. There is no function in the Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library that has not been challenged by computers as a change agent. For that reason, balancing traditional library collections and services with new ones will be a theme of this plan, and assessing the cost of supporting the library in a time of change will be its focus.

In 1993 the Library prepared a "Message to the 2001 Committee" that set forth a number of goals. Some of them have been met. In the area of resources, we have made progress in assessing the collection, developing a collection development policy, and increasing access to computers and computerized resources in the library and throughout the campus. In terms of the instructional role of the library we have reached many first term students in FTS and Curriculum II workshops, we have integrated use of electronic resources into our instruction, and have encouraged student research by maintaining a database of student research presentations and sponsoring a study of the role of research in the Gustavus curriculum. One rather startling measure of progress is that in 1993 the library was not on the campus network; now it difficult to imagine a time when we weren’t.

Some goals—having a research methods component formally embedded in all disciplines, microfilming archived records, carpet and furniture refurbishing, and setting campus standards for data exchange and storage—have not been reached. More seriously, the two items included under "Financial Support of the Library" remain problematic.

Though the budget has increased significantly since 1993, we still do not have the increased staff requested—indeed, we have a reduced staff—and we have not made noticeable progress in increasing the library’s percentage of E&G to the goal at that time of 4.4%. ("Standards for College Libraries," 1995 edition, sets 6% as the standard proportion a library should receive of E&G.) We remain at about the 3.1% that we stood at in 1993. These issues of financial support will be addressed in each of the five sections.
 

College*	% E&G, 1996/7
Gettysburg	7.6
Dickinson	4.9
Vassar	4.5
Carleton	3.8
Franklin & Marshall	3.8
DePauw	3.7
Denison	3.6
Puget Sound	3.6
Middlebury	3.5
St. Olaf	3.5
St. Lawrence	3.4
GUSTAVUS	3.1
Colorado	3
Allegheny	2.7
Furman	2.7
Muhlenberg	2.4

*Figures not available for Hobart and William Smith, Luther, and Wooster Colleges.

This revised strategic plan is one that will address future needs in five interlocking areas:

• Collections
• Staffing
• Services
• Facilities
• Technology

Collections

These days it is getting hard to define a library, much less its collection. The library collections at Gustavus range from sixteenth century books in the special collections to today’s news wires through Lexis/Nexis. The trick is to understand the needs of the community, examine and evaluate the options in a rapidly changing publishing industry, and create the best match possible within budget constraints. Contrary to futuristic hype, traditional print resources are not being replaced by electronic ones; print technology remains the best medium for many kinds of knowledge. Some printed materials—indexes and abstracts, science, technical, and medical journals, and statistical data—lend themselves to electronic access more readily than others. But undergraduate researchers, novices to the disciplines and easily overwhelmed by the flood of information available, still need a highly selective, well-tempered print collection to help them sort through and map out the shape and nature of the disciplines.

Materials available in electronic format tend to fall into two categories: the popular and current resource for which there is a large market, and the highly technical and current scholarly publication, for which the market is small but subscription prices high. Works of academic value that tend not to be produced electronically are ones that fall between these poles or which simply are more easily used in print form—scholarly writing in the humanities and social sciences, book-length studies, trade publications that have valuable content but not a mass audience—and these materials must still be acquired in print formats.

Changes in the marketplace have brought new opportunities or headaches, depending on one’s point of view. Where H.W. Wilson once produced a single, solid line of basic indexes, a large number of publishers are now vying for market share. Evaluating the options available for full text article databases and making them available in their most useful form is a difficult task. Further, publishers of scholarly and STM journals are aggressively marketing electronic products through consortial arrangements. The good news is that a small library like ours can join in a package deal that brings far more publications to the library’s users. The bad news is that we lose the ability to select individual publications that match our curriculum. We also need to invent new ways of tracking an inventory that does not, in the traditional sense, belong to us, making it possible for library users to go from a citation to an article without having to ponder which publisher put it out and so what URL to turn to for access. These marketplace changes also leave us in an uncertain position—it is simply too soon to know which products will survive the frontier atmosphere in publishing today and what, when the dust has cleared, they will cost.

In this volatile market, we face a number of issues:

• new electronic products must be evaluated for content and interface;
• electronic options need to be weighed against print counterparts; we can no longer afford to have print and electronic parallel universes;
• the concept of "ownership" of collections is growing problematic as licenses replace purchase and consortia negotiate package deals;
• "bundling" of publications makes it harder to match collections to the community’s unique needs;
• building a collection that is a long-term asset is complicated when we purchase access to information rather than buy concrete objects that can remain in place on shelves for the next generation of users;
• and contrary to popular notions, information does not yearn to be free; it costs money, and those costs do not appear to significantly decline as publishers migrate to electronic formats.

The 1993 North Central Association accreditation team commented in its report that "[b]udget constraints in recent years have resulted in a book acquisition rate that, if it were to persist, will significantly weaken the quality of the library" (23). A review of the library, conducted in 1994, found that these concerns were already being addressed and urged that "this effort must be continued for many years to come" (Bechtel and Clemmer, 4). They also questioned the use of endowed lines and urged the college to "resist the temptation, in the midst of severe fiscal restraints, to view these funds as fulfilling its own responsibilities for collection building" (5).

Since 1993, the acquisitions budget has received a significant increase, but in the past three years that increase has leveled off. We are, once again, offsetting growth in endowed lines with decreases in unrestricted lines so that we have been virtually flat funded for several years.

The library has made a concerted effort to address collection deficiencies by analyzing the collection as a whole, studying collections in conjunction with program reviews, and filling in noticeable gaps. We have, for example, acquired new foreign language encyclopedias to replace ones that were decades old, built up identified areas of weakness, such as mathematics and Latin American studies, and have sought out new suppliers for foreign and out of print materials. (A dealer in Russian imprints, for example, hunted down in Moscow a fine, affordable edition of a complete works of Tolstoi in Russian, something unavailable through less specialized channels.) We have established a liaison program with departments and have worked toward developing some subject expertise among the librarians, a program that appears to be working both in terms of collection building and improvements in service.

We have spent the majority of budget increases since 1990 on boosting the acquisitions budget; though our operational budget has increased, the increases tend to be in areas that are related to processing and cataloging the increased number of books. Staffing costs have remained fairly static.
 

A collection analysis conducted in November of 1993 was replicated in November of 1997. It suggests that we have made significant gains when compared to where we were. It also indicates that we remain behind in many areas in comparison with St. Olaf and St. John’s—collections that we were able to compare ourselves with in detail using PALS statistics. Appendix A offers a sample of current (post 1980 imprint) comparative holdings by subject area of these three libraries in 1993 and 1997; Appendix B compares call number areas of the total collections of St. Olaf and Gustavus.

When measured against available data on the comparison colleges, our acquisitions expenditures, though much improved since 1993, are still low. The median number of volumes added per student reported by colleges included in HEDS data is 4.8; for Gustavus it is 3.2.
 

College*	total acq. $	$/student	total vols.	vols. added 96/97
Vassar	$ 1,407,108.00	$ 609.00	763,978	8,654
Middlebury	$ 1,198,850.00	$ 572.00	537,411	19,716
Carleton	$ 1,074,463.00	$ 571.00	514,029	13,858
Dickinson	$ 911,136.00	$ 523.00	440,912	9,464
Franklin & Marshall	$ 883,207.00	$ 500.00	401,080	10,235
St. Lawrence	$ 923,032.00	$ 459.00	472,258	12,205
Wooster	$ 691,139.00	$ 407.00	319,162	10,974
Gettysburg	$ 759,818.00	$ 366.00	301,010	9,915
Denison	$ 663,358.00	$ 347.00	335,119	12,278
Colorado	$ 628,203.00	$ 327.00	439,071	8,435
Allegheny	$ 551,549.00	$ 304.55	414,595	5,858
DePauw	$ 563,587.00	$ 261.00	293,037	8,497
Furman	$ 599,237.00	$ 246.09	215,821	10,879
Puget Sound	$ 694,428.00	$ 241.29	425,992	17,420
St. Olaf	$ 641,730.00	$ 225.00	488,299	13,228
GUSTAVUS	$ 498,786.00	$ 208.00	248,034	7,706
Muhlenberg	$ 299,900.00	$ 158.26	205,335	2,005

*Figures not available for Hobart and William Smith and Luther Colleges.

Recommendations

• increase the percent of E&G going to the library so that the acquisitions (and related support operations) can reach a level that better matches our community’s needs. At this admittedly efficient college, the library ought to have an adequate share of resources. We should attempt to match at least the percent of those colleges we compete with, if not the level recommended by national standards.
• continue to build liaison relationships with faculty. These can foster a more holistic approach to collection development so that it is tied to the future direction of academic programs, trends in scholarship in the disciplines, and ways of embedding research skills into the curriculum so that all students can take full advantage of the collection;
• weed the collection of outdated or worn out materials and replace materials where necessary (a goal that in large part depends on staff availability). This will not only improve researchers ability to locate useful and valid information, it is a process that helps identify areas of weakness or editions that need replacement.
• expand efforts to evaluate the collection, both as a whole and in connection with special projects and department reviews. These efforts can include comparative measures with like institutions, comparison with core lists, and analysis of usage patterns utilizing both circulation data provided through the online catalog and qualitative measures such as interviews, focus groups, and analysis of student research writing;
• and resist the trend of offsetting increases in endowment with cuts in unrestricted lines. In the past three years the library has been essentially flat funded even though our uniquely dedicated friends group has worked incredibly hard to raise an amazing amount of money for the library. Though building endowment in this manner may make fiscal sense, donors to the library should be assured their gifts ensure some improvement in library funding—otherwise their donations designated for the library essentially fund a transfer of budget to other college operations, and we risk misleading our donors with a financial shell game.

The library needs to have a well-prepared, creative, and flexible staff to make the benefits of current and future information resources available to meet the changing needs of the Gustavus community. The staff face many immediate challenges, among them:

• reconsidering all of our work in view of the paradigm shift from the Gutenberg universe to the electronic information transfer;
• migration to a new statewide online catalog system;
• upgrading and adapting to changes in software used in all library functions. Procedures that twenty years ago were rarely changed in any significant way now must be redesigned frequently;
• keeping up with the burgeoning of new resources made available through the Internet and through consortial agreements with other libraries;
• understanding concurrent changes in classroom pedagogies and student learning;
• dealing with a radically changed and evolving publishing industry;
• keeping abreast of changing patterns in scholarly communication;
• working with evolving concepts of intellectual property;
• building a solid print collection of lasting value while providing electronic resources;
• and evaluating consortial opportunities that benefit our community without losing sight of our community’s unique needs.

The acceleration of technological advances makes demands on staff time and requires continuing education. The library faculty have to broaden their collection development responsibilities into areas where the publishing industry is in a state of flux, learn how scholars are using new technologies to share knowledge, evaluate and learn the ropes of new databases and other products, balance the need for traditional and electronic sources, create user-friendly gateways to a multitude of resources that have diverse characteristics, and teach the community how to conduct research in this hybrid world of print and electronic knowledge. Paraprofessional staff, responsible for many of the library’s basic functions, must have time to evaluate alternatives, learn new software, trouble shoot inevitable glitches, work new capabilities into work patterns, train student employees to cope with complex tasks using computers, and assess the effectiveness of the work for which they are responsible, all without shutting down services while they retool. Every staff member needs two kinds of support in this process: funding for training and professional development and sufficient time to master the new technologies. Without adequate funding, the library’s support for the college curriculum will be diminished and all members of the Gustavus community stand to lose.

The Current Situation

Currently the staff consists of 5.5 librarians and 8.5 support staff. We also employ students for over 17,000 hours annually. According to national standards and in comparison to similar colleges, our staffing is notably below par. According to the Association of College and Research Libraries "Standards for College Libraries," we should have eleven librarians and eighteen support staff. The current staffing level rates a low "D" in terms of the national standard.

If our staffing levels are compared to the fourteen comparison colleges, we also come up short.
 
 

College	FTE Librarians	FTE Enrollment	Student/Librarian Ratio
Vassar	15	2310	154
Middlebury	12.8	2097	163.83
Dickinson	9	1742	193.56
St. Lawrence	10.25	2013	196.39
Franklin & Marshall	9	1828	203.11
DePauw	10	2090	209
Allegheny	8	1855	231.88
Gettysburg	9	2100	233.33
St. Olaf	12.07	2854	236.45
Carleton	7.76	1883	242.65
Denison	7.25	1913	263.86
Colorado	7	1919	274.14
Wooster	6	1674	279
Hobart and William Smith	6	1822	303.67
Luther	7	2350	335.71
Furman	8	2976	372
Puget Sound	8	2980	372.5
GUSTAVUS	5.5	2399	436.18
Muhlenberg	4	1767	441.75

Among comparison colleges the average number of students per librarian is 270.68. That is far lower than Gustavus’s ratio of 436.18 students per librarian. In fact, only one college—Muhlenberg—has a worse ratio than we do. (See Appendix C for a graph of these ratios.) If we were to aspire to average status among our comparison colleges we would need to have 8.68 librarians. Then, if you adhere to the ACRL standards for college libraries formula that suggests support staff should account for 65% of the total staff we should have 14.5 support staff as well. Obviously, comparatively and by the benchmarks set in national standards, our staff situation is strikingly inadequate.

A review of the library conducted in 1994 concluded that staff productivity was high, but levels of staffing were too low. It is worth quoting from the report in some detail:

Staff productivity remains high. If you compare statistics for 1991/92—the year used by the library’s reviewers—with statistics from 1996/97, our productivity levels have, if anything, increased. The number of instruction session has increased to 87 in sessions from 60, the book acquisition rate, with attendant staff inputs of selection, acquisition, cataloging, and processing, has gone from 2,904 to 7,706, and while interlibrary loan transactions have actually declined from 9,654 to 8,920 due to increased acquisitions and full text options, we have added fairly complex functions for paying copyright fees and rapid document delivery. However, there are a number of important projects that are either not attempted or that don’t get sufficient attention because of insufficient staff levels. These include:

• Restore the circulation department to previous levels of staffing. This can be accomplished by restoring the night supervisor position (a half time, nine month position) and bringing the circulation manager back to 40 hours a week (from the current 35 hour/ week position.) This will cost under $10,000 annually;
• provide funding for staff development so that librarians and support staff can attend conferences ($400 per staff member/year, additional funds available for presenters.) This will cost from $6,000-$10,000 annually. A staff development committee can evaluate requests, approve expenditures, and coordinate evaluation of the program. Staff members will be expected to share the results of their conference travel with other staff and, where relevant, other members of the Gustavus community through written reports or informal presentations. A listing of staff development activities will be included in the library’s annual report;
• assess current workload for each position to adjust for new demands and create a means of reevaluating and adjusting workload on an ongoing basis. This will require each staff member evaluating their own work, for units to examine workload issues together, and for the entire staff to set priorities and engage in assessment. It may also involve discussion with the Human Resources department and involvement in the campus wide effort to examine faculty workload issues. The first steps in this process will begin in January 1998 and will continue indefinitely;
• examine the work of library paraprofessionals vis à vis other hourly workers to see if they are at appropriate comparable status and, if not, lobby for improving it. This effort will require internal discussion followed by work with the Human Resources department, as well as examination of practices and solutions in the profession;
• and work toward adding positions at both faculty and paraprofessional levels so that we achieve a student/librarian ratio of at least 320/1 and a "C" rating according to ACRL standards. To do this the college would have to add two more librarians (bringing the total librarian FTE to 7.5) and four more support staff, bringing the paraprofessional total to 12.4).

It is very difficult to quantify and compare services provided by libraries. Their success or failure is largely a matter of how important services are in the mission of the library. It is also driven by the availability of a staff with sufficient time and training to measure the community’s needs, research options, and assess service programs. Yet this difficult to measure quality has an enormous impact on how well a library works. The issues we face in providing services today include:

• teaching students to perform research in an environment that is rapidly changing and growing always more complex;
• maintaining a high degree of efficiency in basic library functions—circulating books, processing interlibrary loan requests, handling course reserves and the like—as computerized subsystems and routines change rapidly;
• providing publicity, training, and assessment for new electronic products;
• and providing services to remote library users in an increasingly distributed environment.

The department review of 1994 reported that the library’s services fit a "low input/selectively high output pattern" that reflects a strong service ethic on the part of the library staff. They concluded that staff efficiency and service attitude might even have masked the shortage of resources. They cited the quality and quantity of the instructional sessions, number of interlibrary loan transactions, and liberal hours of operation as signs of health. Though comparisons are difficult to make, some figures relating to services are available from some comparison colleges. Given that we have the second lowest staffing ratio per student of all of the colleges, figures relating to our services are relatively high.
 
 

College*	ILL to others	ILL received	Circulation	Reserves	Instruct. Sessions	hrs open/week
Carleton	1891	3978	84014	75242	115	105
Colorado	4666	4243	67251	3178	425	102
Denison	12764	14541	46194	11915	141	109
DePauw	2819	6159	57450	9567	56	106
Dickinson	5339	3803	22415	5312	262	103
Franklin & Marshall	7434	6340	63492	22789	na	106
Gettysburg	3286	5302	55758	25430	30	145
GUSTAVUS	1958	6257	58516	9470	87	101
Middlebury	6550	5951	143598	35011	101	108
St. Lawrence	10013	6355	57636	11666	91	105.5
St. Olaf	4593	5939	195166	51223	179	102
Vassar	7005	6064	143632	81292	210	102.5
Wooster	4410	10522	55333	17628	62	103

*Figures not available for Allegheny, Furman, Hobart and William Smith, Luther, and Muhlenberg Colleges and the University of Puget Sound.

The library, on a practical level, has always tried to minimize the hassles that can deflect a student from successfully finding and using resources by providing easy access to materials, a sensible arrangement of resources, and responsive staff that help students find their way. The library is also deeply committed to integrating inquiry and research into the curriculum and making the skills required for independent discovery of knowledge available to all students. The changing nature of our collections from primarily print to a mixture of print and electronic has offered some significant challenges to our services. It isn’t just a matter of pointing out an index and the card catalog any longer. At the reference desk, we find ourselves offering more options, each of which requires learning on the part of students. A single reference question relating to water resources or women’s history might involve helping students use books, articles, government documents, microfilmed primary sources, electronic databases, and web sites. In instructional sessions we must teach students how to choose their best path through an increasingly complex maze of resources, helping them plan a research process, understand how to use resources, and evaluate texts, print and electronic, for validity.

We should be taking a leadership role on campus in teaching ways of using the Internet for research. We are integrating print and electronic resources in our written documentation, both in terms of printed subject guides and on our web site. These require a great deal of time and effort to develop and constantly update, a problem that has grown as we migrate to off-site and volatile electronic resources, and we are currently not able to update our resource guides regularly. Services can also be improved if we assess them—something that we must begin to do more rigorously. And on the most prosaic level, maintaining the mechanics of a hybrid print/electronic library is a constant challenge.

Recommendations

• Regularize research skills instruction in the first semester experience so that all students gain a basic mastery of the library by the end of their first term. This year we met with more FTS sections than ever, but still 30% of the sections had no library workshop. Even among the classes held, content was far from standardized. There is currently no agreed-upon notion of what "basic mastery" might mean;
• increase our instructional offerings to include more course-related sessions that integrate print and electronic resources so that whenever a research task is required, instructors know that a librarian can collaborate with the class to help them learn the ropes;
• investigate ways of working with faculty to embed research skills into their majors. This has been explored tentatively in the past, but there was no consensus among departments that research skills within the discipline were a priority. Currently our instructional efforts depend upon the goodwill of those faculty that value library research sufficiently to devote class time to it;
• explore means of providing instruction to all students on using electronic resources for research. Students arrive at Gustavus with very little sophistication about searching the Internet. They may have some familiarity with the buttons and commands found on a browser, but they have little conception of how to plan or carry out research in an electronic environment;
• investigate the development of credit-bearing partial-credit courses; a suite of short courses designed for graduate or professional school bound students could focus on disciplinary resources that go well beyond basic research skills and prepare students for the work they have ahead of them;
• establish a means of producing and updating resource documentation efficiently. This ranges from class handouts to subject guides to our web pages to a newsletter for informing our community about new resources and research opportunities. Though they take time, they can reach well beyond the reference desk or classroom;
• develop feedback mechanisms so that faculty and student attitudes and needs can be measured and addressed. We have not had an advisory committee in recent memory. The reorganization of the faculty senate’s committee structure might provide a site for a faculty advisory function under the aegis of the Academic Operations committee; the student senate subcommittee that selects the browsing collection might be able to broaden their charge to include a wider advisory function;
• and establish ongoing measures of assessment for all library services and report on them annually so that time-series data can be developed. We have kept records of the things that can be counted easily and that are required for comparative statistics. We need to develop ways of evaluating reference, instruction, and other services which are such an important part of what we do.

Facilities

The Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library, now twenty five years old, remains a pleasant, adaptable, functional building. It was praised in both the accreditation report and the departmental review as being an inviting and well designed space. The music library, too, is an attractive space that has seen many changes over the years and adapted well to them.

Contrary to the notion that the virtual library is upon us, libraries in this age of change remain necessary places on campuses. Students—particularly undergraduates integrating knowledge from a wide range of classes as well as learning the ropes of a major—can benefit greatly from being physically able to explore the layout of a discipline by browsing materials on the shelves. The physical layout of a well chosen print collection offers a map of knowledge that is simply not visible through electronic browsing. Beyond that there is a serendipitous discovery factor in a college library: students looking for a quiet carrel might encounter nineteenth century periodicals that aren’t available through any electronic resource, or be seduced by books on art while heading towards the economics section. Moreover, the library as a physical place at a residential college has a special role, providing a pleasant, quiet, contemplative space for study, an individualized classroom that is open late at night and on weekends, even when there is a blizzard or the Internet is down. Challenges the library faces in terms of facilities include:
 
 

• maintenance of a building and its furnishings that are now twenty five years old;
• reworking the physical facility to accommodate both collection growth and electronic resource provision;
• changing the environment to accommodate changes in the instructional role of the library;
• and budgeting for occasional necessary expenses that are significant—such as recarpeting and replacement of hundreds of chairs—in a frugal environment in which budgeting is done on a year by year basis.

The library’s design has made it possible to adapt fairly well to changes in library resources. The building originally had seating for around 1,000 students; currently we can seat around 850, not counting seats at the 24 public computing stations or at index, cd-rom, or catalog stations. That is a significant reduction in study spaces, but remains well within an "A" rating according to the "Standards for College Libraries." The original library plan was drawn up with the idea of housing a collection of some 300,000 volumes; we remain around 50,000 volumes short of that limit and don’t feel an immediate concern about collection space that shifting and the addition of some shelving won’t solve. We have been able to wire for computers and reallocate the space used previously as a smoking lounge to a create a small hands-on computer lab. Diligent maintenance and a student body that isn’t inclined to express itself in the form of graffiti has kept the facility fairly fresh. However, the furnishings were purchased without computers in mind and most of it is now twenty five years old, some of it requiring replacement in the not too distant future. Other facilities—bathroom counters, carpets, ceiling panels—are showing signs of age. Some of the exterior brick work, particularly the wall at the entrance to the library, needs work.

There are some significant needs beyond those that simply come with age. Most pressing is the need to have air conditioning in the music library. The scores and recordings in that space, a major investment on the part of the college, suffer from excessive heat in the summer. The 1994 library review stated categorically that air conditioning was needed. We also have asked for several years that additional office space be added to accommodate a librarian that now has his desk in the government documents processing office, a space that must be shared with six work study students, a support staff member, and the general public seeking assistance with the government documents collection. We have some storage space needs that will not go away, and need another instructional space if we are to offer instruction on electronic resources.

Recommendations

Some maintenance requirements are fairly pressing; these include:

• repair of the wall at the entrance of the library;
• exterior windowsill repair;
• bathroom sink and repair or replacement;
• bathroom wall repair;
• replacement of bathroom counters and counters at AV and Government Documents service points;
• painting or refinishing of rusted ceiling panels on all three floors;
• and some thought must be given to the long-range replacement of furniture and carpeting. There are plans to replace the twenty five year old carpeting on a floor by floor basis, a project that will cost $30,000-$40,000 per floor. The carrels in the public areas are in good shape, having been refinished over the last two years. They remain functional, though students complain of the small study spaces, which are significantly below the national standards which suggest 25 to 35 square feet per study station (while ours are closer to 16). It would be possible to expand the surfaces for study in some areas by installing longer countertops in some of the serpentine carrels, a fairly inexpensive adaptation. On the other hand, the chairs have been repaired repeatedly and will eventually need to be replaced altogether. The office furniture in the library is functional, but purchased before computers became the site of most library work, so are ergonomically ill-adapted to most functions. It would seem sensible that furniture replacement—particularly the hundreds of chairs in the public areas and the AV classrooms—should be considered and budgeted for within a campus wide plan.

• air conditioning for the music library;
• construction of an office for the government documents librarian. Our last estimate for this was $5,000;
• new security gates for the entrance to the library that would be more reliable (the current gates tend to pick up interference from the increased number of computers in the library) and that would allow us to remove the turnstiles from the entrance, a barrier to handicapped access. This will likely cost somewhere in the range of $20,000.
• improved storage space for the library and for archives;
• and expanded instructional space for an electronic classroom. The cost of creating a site for this is not expected to be high—it could be situated in a current AV room or in a slightly renovated reference office space on the second floor. The major expense involved would be for computers, detailed in the technology section below.

Technology

Computers have made our work more challenging, exciting, productive, and at times frustrating than any other technology that has come along in living memory. In libraries, computer technology has irrevocably changed not only the way we do research but how we conceive of libraries as places and as bodies of recorded knowledge. As our collection changes to embrace new electronic options, our needs in the area of technology—hardware, software, and support—have grown enormously.

Most of the challenges the library faces articulated in the four areas covered above relate to technology. The changes wrought by the computer on the publication industry, on knowledge production in academia, on library operations, and on higher education in general have radically changed what we do in nearly every aspect. Planning for technological change is a tricky business, requiring foresight, awareness of trends, and a certain amount of clairvoyance. One thing that we can certainly count on is that we will have to devote significant financial resources to technology and that we will have to do so within an organization that learns fast and adapts quickly to change. Some specific issues we face include:

• assuring that the campus has computers adequate to access the new statewide library system that we anticipate migrating to in the year 2000;
• access to facilities for hands-on instruction;
• providing sufficient time and resources for library staff to learn essential new technologies;
• defining the library’s role in provision of information technology instruction and resources;
• and building into the budget process a mechanism for sustaining technological change through an adequate hardware replacement cycle.

When we submitted our last planning document the library was not on the campus network. We were, in fact, among the first of campus units to rely on computer networks for our basic functions but nearly the last to be wired. That year the North Central Accreditation team recommended "[s]trengthening the ties between the library and the curriculum and between the library and the academic computing department" and urged the college to "maximize effective coordination of and planning for rapid changes in information technology" (23). The 1994 department review criticized the campus for having too conservative an approach to changes in scholarly communication and faulted the library for not having a clear path for decision making about technology issues.

We have come a long way since then. We now have available end-user access to a wide variety of subject databases including campus wide access to the MLA International Bibliography, PsychLit, Current Contents, CINAHL, and dozens more through the FirstSearch program. We have in-library access to many resources for which a campus license is prohibitively expensive, including America History and Life, SportDiscus, and the Music Index. The science departments have been furnished accounts for searching Chemical Abstracts and for document delivery of scientific articles through the Uncover program. We have campus wide access to full text materials including IAC databases accessible through PALS, Lexis/Nexis, nursing journals through CINAHL, Project Muse, the IDEAL program for Academic Press journals, and even the Britannica Online. We have a small computer lab that has given us the opportunity to do hands-on instruction with small classes, notably the first term seminars.

However, there are issues that will need to be addressed in the near future. A focus group (consisting of Terry Metz, systems librarian of Carleton College, Lynn Burg, Barbara Fister, Sandy Fuhr, and Don Zhou of the library, Pat Francek of Media Services, Phil Guenther and Kathy Spexet of the IT department, and student Todd Walden) convened in October 1997 identified two areas in particular as priorities. The library will need to upgrade its equipment to run the new statewide catalog system. This isn’t a luxury or a matter of choice, it will be essential infrastructure for maintaining a library catalog, checking out books, and performing other basic functions. Because the interface will be web based, the entire campus will have to have computers with adequate memory for running a web browser efficiently if they are to access the catalog. Within the library, a number of older staff computers and public terminals will need to be replaced. Currently we have only ten computers that meet the new standard. We will have to have an additional twenty one staff and public computers by the implementation date. Beyond that, we will have to plan for a replacement cycle, ensure adequate technical support for these machines, and have sufficient staff training and time to make the transition.

The second pressing concern relates to teaching the new technologies. We have had sufficient experience now, having taught the use of an online catalog for over ten years, to recognize that there is no substitute for hands-on instruction when it comes to electronic research tools. There seems to be a motor aspect to learning where computers are concerned that is essential to successful understanding. (See Jakobovits for a discussion of the importance of the psychomotor domain in library instruction.) We have been able to project a computer display in a classroom to demonstrate electronic searching since around 1991; hands-on work had to be done by taking a class to the reference area to work on the public terminals. We gained a lab with around ten computers in it in 1996 and have found students’ engagement and learning to be significantly improved when hands-on work in a classroom setting is available. However, we need a larger facility to accommodate average-sized classes. We also need a replacement cycle. The Macs in the small lab are now seven years old, hand-me-downs given to the library when newer machines were installed in the Confer lab. We have no funding to replace computers in that lab and they are no longer reliable. It is not uncommon to have fewer than a third of the Macs still working by the end of an hour of instruction.

Computer labs in the library offer other advantages. These labs can be used by students when not reserved for instruction. For many years students have expressed a need for computer access for writing and research in the library. As writers learning to live in this hybrid print/electronic world, they naturally find it helpful to have access to non-circulating print materials as well as to electronic resources as they compose. Clearly research, reading, and composing are not separate functions (see Brent for a cogent discussion of the recursive nature of research writing) and the library has attempted to integrate in its instruction program these recursive processes. We feel that having machines available for writing and research within the walls of the library will assist students in making those processes work effectively, even when we aren’t formally teaching them. The fact that our small instruction lab, when not booked for classes, is constantly in use even though the machines are too old to run the current campus standard for word processing and Internet browser software suggests that the location of the lab in the library is a strong factor in choosing to work on those machines.

Beyond these two priorities, we will need to work more closely with the IT department, Media Services, and the faculty to integrate our efforts to make technology work for the campus. Formal administrative links are less necessary than regular communication and joint planning; indeed, Larry Hardesty’s research suggests that administrative merging is not a trend that offers much benefit to liberal arts institutions ("Relationships"). If a collaborative mechanism can be put in place to ensure regular joint planning among the Library, IT, and Media Services staff and if the new faculty committee structure can assist in coordinating these units’ efforts to support the curriculum, we should be able to provide complementary services and programs that work well together.

Recommendations

In addition to the technology-related recommendations listed in other areas, we have a number of hardware and planning needs, including the need to:

• purchase sufficient computers that meet standards for the new state wide system by summer 2000. This will cost around $46,000;
• purchase replacement machines for the current instruction lab at a cost of around $24,000;
• construct a new instruction lab to accommodate larger classes; rough estimates for this run from $70,000 to $100,000. We plan to investigate grant funding to help support this effort;
• build a regular replacement cycle into our budget process, allowing for replacement of one third of our computers each year at a current cost of around $23,000;
• add wiring and plug in ports in some areas of the library for laptop network access;
• find a campus-wide means of charging back for public computer printing costs;
• establish standards for technology proficiency for library staff, supported by staff development funding;
• and work closely with IT and Media Services to define our complementary roles and plan our joint strategies for supporting the curriculum, in collaboration with appropriate faculty committees.

This planning document analyzes the current status of our library and our future needs and identifies a number of expensive investments that we feel are necessary for the future research and curricular needs of the college. One unnamed commentator in Larry Hardesty’s study bemoaned the fiscal difficulties of combining the old "bottomless pit" of the library and the new "black hole" of computing while seeking economies in a time of retrenchment ("Relationships" 3). Without a doubt, the new technologies that are adding so many research opportunities cannot be entirely funded through reallocation of existing levels of funding, given that we will be living on the cusp of change and needing to provide both print and electronic information for some time to come. Furthermore, the computer has not proven to offer the improvements in productivity that many expected. Some economists believe it is a matter of time—in the past, productivity changes brought by changes in technology have taken decades to be realized. Others point to the fact that the sector most affected by technology, the service sector, is notoriously resistant to quantifiable productivity measurements ("Productivity"). Whatever the reason, the computer has created the paradoxical situation of giving us the ability to get more work done faster while simultaneously offering us more opportunities that quickly become essential.

We have a great many needs if the library is to support a college of the quality that we envision. On the other hand, this report—created by the collaborative effort of the whole library staff and the contributions of focus groups—illustrates that we have many strengths and a common commitment to continue to serve the Gustavus community, a commitment that will help us take advantage of change rather than letting it take advantage of us.
 

Works Cited

The library conducted a collection analysis in November 1993 that was replicated in November 1997. This table compares samples of Gustavus, St. Olaf, and St. John’s current collections (books published since 1980) by call number area in 1993 and 1997. (Note that some samples are affected by differences in cataloging policy and in curriculum. Some of St. John’s holdings are low because those areas are primarily collected in their sister library at St. Ben’s.)

Change in Gustavus collections
 

sample call number range	GAC 93	GAC 97	% change
BD (Philosophy)	116	228	197%
BF (Psychology)	610	983	161%
BL (Comparative Religion)	330	606	184%
BS (Bible and exegesis)	346	516	149%
DD (German History)	123	199	162%
DT (African History)	170	298	175%
E 74? (20th Cen. US History)	108	173	160%
F 14?? (Latin Am. History)	82	221	270%
GN (Anthropology)	268	432	161%
HF (Management)	163	399	245%
JC (Political Theory)	186	374	201%
LB 15?? (Primary Education)	88	199	201%
LB 23?? (Higher Education)	81	136	168%
ML (Music--books only)	831	1296	156%
NA (Architecture)	315	441	140%
ND (Painting)	252	471	187%
P 8? and P9? (Comm. Studies)	120	229	191%
PA (Classics)	270	472	175%
PQ 26?? (Selected French Lit.)	95	199	209%
PR 28?? (Selected Shakespeare)	62	94	152%
PS 356? (Selected Cont. Am. Lit.)	306	704	230%
QA (Math and CS)	328	1074	327%
QC (Physics)	341	588	172%
QD (Chemistry)	262	349	133%
QK (Botany)	98	171	174%
RT (Nursing)	330	331	100%
SD (Forestry and Conservation)	14	34	243%

Change in St. John’s collections and percent change compared to Gustavus
 

sample call number range	SJU 93		SJU 97		% change	%SJU/GAC 93	%SJU/GAC 97
BD (Philosophy)		225		305	136%	194%	134%
BF (Psychology)		768		1,131	149%	126%	115%
BL (Comparative Religion)		926		1,377	149%	281%	227%
BS (Bible and exegesis)		3,019
DD (German History)		283		377	133%	230%	189%
DT (African History)		215		278	129%	126%	93%
E 74? (20th Cen. US History)		67		152	227%	62%	88%
F 14?? (Latin Am. History)		108		163	151%	132%	74%
GN (Anthropology)		215		261	121%	80%	60%
HF (Management)				817
JC (Political Theory)		336		463	138%	181%	124%
LB 15?? (Primary Education)		25		43	172%	28%	22%
LB 23?? (Higher Education)		57		84	147%	70%	62%
ML (Music--books only)		1,052		1,566	149%	127%	121%
NA (Architecture)		665		1,080	162%	211%	245%
ND (Painting)		367		517	141%	146%	110%
P 8? and P9? (Comm. Studies)		129		171	133%	108%	75%
PA (Classics)		731		985	135%	271%	209%
PQ 26?? (Selected French Lit.)		110		146	133%	116%	73%
PR 28?? (Selected Shakespeare)		65		101	155%	105%	107%
PS 356? (Selected Cont. Am. Lit.)		650		986	152%	212%	140%
QA (Math and CS)				906
QC (Physics)		110		524	476%	32%	89%
QD (Chemistry)		239		302	126%	91%	87%
QK (Botany)		112		152	136%	114%	89%
RT (Nursing)		14		3	21%	4%	1%
SD (Forestry and Conservation)		30		45	150%	214%	132%

Change in St. Olaf’s collections and percent change compared to Gustavus
 

sample call number range	SOC 93	SOC 97	% change	%SOC/GAC 93	%SOC/GAC 97
BD (Philosophy)	421	560	133%	363%	246%
BF (Psychology)	1432	1910	133%	235%	194%
BL (Comparative Religion)	927	1290	139%	281%	213%
BS (Bible and exegesis)	1347	1868	139%	389%	362%
DD (German History)	373	476	128%	303%	239%
DT (African History)	641	817	127%	377%	274%
E 74? (20th Cen. US History)	181	233	129%	168%	135%
F 14?? (Latin Am. History)	236	338	143%	288%	153%
GN (Anthropology)	468	660	141%	175%	153%
HF (Management)	755	946	125%	463%	237%
JC (Political Theory)	568	766	135%	305%	205%
LB 15?? (Primary Education)	60	86	143%	68%	43%
LB 23?? (Higher Education)	165	248	150%	204%	182%
ML (Music--books only)	2408	3422	142%	290%	264%
NA (Architecture)	693	913	132%	220%	207%
ND (Painting)	819	1078	132%	325%	229%
P 8? and P9? (Comm. Studies)	184	235	128%	153%	103%
PA (Classics)	659	880	134%	244%	186%
PQ 26?? (Selected French Lit.)	473	558	118%	498%	280%
PR 28?? (Selected Shakespeare)	222	275	124%	358%	293%
PS 356? (Selected Cont. Am. Lit.)	1444	1842	128%	472%	262%
QA (Math and CS)	3759
QC (Physics)	779	970	125%	228%	165%
QD (Chemistry)	702	859	122%	268%	246%
QK (Botany)	252	348	138%	257%	204%
RT (Nursing)	417	350	84%	126%	106%
SD (Forestry and Conservation)	55	80	145%	393%	235%

This table compares the size of the total collection at Gustavus and St. Olaf, by call number range. Again, some figures are affected by differences in local cataloging policies and in curriculum.
 

call number section	total items GAC	total items SOC	%SOC/GAC
A--general	2519	8018	318%
B--philosophy	5231	10378	198%
BF--psychology	4585	7631	166%
BL--comp. religion	2247	3852	171%
BM--Judaism, Islam, Buddhism	1090	2555	234%
BR--Christianity	12667	28032	221%
C--archaeology, biography,	1968	6565	334%
D--history--general, European	12681	24682	195%
DS--Asia	4389	8574	195%
DT--Africa	1550	2434	157%
DU--Oceania	301	618	205%
E--American history	9985	17716	177%
F--Latin America	4785	10637	222%
G--geography, anthropology	4114	5516	134%
GV--sports	1552	3033	195%
GV 1580--dance	385	1258	327%
H--social sciences	2114	3460	164%
HB--economics	12500	26037	208%
HM--sociology	12536	20114	160%
J--political science	8364	14191	170%
K--law	3503	4826	138%
L--education	8122	9691	119%
M--music	9205	38745	421%
N--art	7791	17539	225%
P--communications	1075	1700	88%
PA--classics	1921	4400	229%
PB--languages	1934	7356	380%
PG--Slavic and Oriental	3561	6454	181%
PN--lit. history, drama and poetry	6120	4096	67%
PN 3311--prose	2527	3344	132%
PQ--Romance, French	2991	8018	268%
PQ 4001--Italian	414	851	206%
PQ6001--Spanish	2476	3790	153%
PR--English	13542	28689	212%
PS--American	13515	23383	173%
PT--Germanic	2914	7138	245%
PT 5001--Scandinavian	1774	10019	565%
PZ--children's and fiction	3956	4829	122%
Q--science	1725	2889	167%
QA--math and cs	3454	11394	330%
QB--astronomy	648	901	139%
QC--physics	2201	3561	162%
QD--chemistry	4718	3837	81%
QH--natural history	2100	2977	142%
QK--botany	760	1135	149%
QL--zoology and physiology	3078	4492	146%
QR--microbiology	292	447	153%
R--medicine	4560	8231	181%
S--agriculture	1364	3612	265%
T--technology	3971	6429	162%
U--military science	1080	8798	815%
Z--bibliography	5290	4391	83%

GAC/SOC Collections, A-GV

GAC/SOC Collections, H-PS

GAC/SOC Collections, PT-Z

Collections

Increase percent of E&G for the library.
Improve liaison relationships with departments.
Weed collection of outdated materials.
Expand efforts to evaluate the collection.
Resist the trend to cut the unrestricted budget as the endowed budget grows.

Staffing

Restore circulation department to previous levels of staffing.
Improve funding for staff development.
Assess current workload for each position.
Examine status of library paraprofessionals vis à vis other hourly workers on campus.
Add staff at both professional and paraprofessional levels.

Services

Regularize first term library instruction.
Increase the number of course related sessions.
Find ways to embed research skills into the majors.
Explore means of offering instruction on electronic resources.
Develop credit bearing partial-credit courses.
Find ways to produce and update resource documentation efficiently.
Establish faculty and student advisory groups.
Establish means of assessment for library services.

Facilities

Repair wall at entrance of the library.
Repair exterior widowsill masonry.
Replace or repair bathroom sinks and walls.
Replace counters for AV and Government Documents service points and bathrooms.
Paint or refinish rusted ceiling tiles on all three floors.
Develop a long-range plan to replace furniture and carpeting.
Air condition the music library.
Construct an office for the Government Documents librarian.
Install new security gate.
Improve storage for the library and the archives.
Provide increased space for instruction.

Technology

Purchase computers necessary for new state wide catalog system.
Purchase replacement machines for current instruction lab.
Construct and furnish a new, larger instruction lab.
Build a replacement cycle for computer hardware into the budget cycle.
Add wiring for plug-in laptop network access.
Find a means of charging back computer printing costs.
Establish standards for technology proficiency for staff, with funding for development.
Work closely with IT and Media Services to define our roles and plan strategies.