To:      Faculty Council Library Committee

From:  Sohair W. Elbaz, Dean of Libraries

Date:   February 21, 2001

Re:       Galvin Library Current Status Report

 

Gentlemen,

 

Once again, thank you for your interest in the library's well being.

 

In this letter, I will answer questions that we discussed in our meeting and reply to the comments supplied by Professor Spector regarding his department's concerns.

 

Library Budget:

 

The Library has a number of accounts (currently 28 accounts). The main account, Ledger 2, is where salaries and books and journals acquisition funds are allocated each year by the university based on needs presented by the library director and the university's ability to fulfill those needs.

 

The FY 00/01 budget in Ledger 2 is $1,985,002 of which $1,350,898 is salaries and benefits, $229,500 for journals and books, $170,000 for Databases and $93,221 in other operating expenses such as binding, document delivery, supplies, facility maintenance, etc.

 

I also administer 18 endowment accounts where a revenue of $200,000-$230,000 is realized each year. All endowment funds are spent on journals. The remaining accounts are for grants which vary from year-to-year.

 

The library spends an average of $400K on 600 print journals, $75K on books, and $340K on databases. The shortfall is usually covered at the end of the year by the Vice President and through grant writing activities of the library staff.

 

The Library depends on grants to support maintenance and upgrades of its technology. No capital budget is allocated for the library. The library has obtained the amounts of $121,000, $35,000, $6,812, $2,165, $21,000, $11,000, $10,000, $2,000 for FY 2000/01. We have also secured large gift collections that are valued at $900,000.

 

 

 

 

Procedures for book fund allocations:

 

A modified Library acquisition formula called the Lowry Formula is used for fund distribution among departments. This formula uses a number of variables into account including, for each department: faculty FTE count, graduate student credit hours taken, undergraduate student credit hours taken, grant funds received, and number of publications.

 

Journal Collection:

 

The library subscribes to 442 print journals and receives about 400 governmental publications from the Government Printing Office as we are a partial Government Document depository. We also receive 177 of journals on a gift basis.

 

At this point, we no longer cut journals unless requested by faculty as a substitute for a new one that is more important to the department. Because of our inability to obtain all needed material, some departments (such as Math and Manufacturing Engineering) have been helping us financially to acquire new journals, books, and databases.

 

Please note that journals have an annual inflation rate of 18- 21% and most of the reference material and journals we purchase are quite expensive. Here are some examples: Chem. Abstracts $19,447, Bio Abstracts $17,000, Tetrahedron $12,612 and the Tetrahedron letters $9,036, Physical Review $11,160, J. of Cellular Physiology $4,735, J of Applied Polymer Sic. $11,570, FEP Letters $3778, J of Physics $7486, J of Physics A $5,697, J of Physics B $3976, and J of Material Sci. $6,477.

Reciprocal Agreements:

 

The Library is a member of the ILCSO consortium of libraries. (http://www.ilcso.uiuc.edu:591/directory/search.htm) Our students and faculty have access to 45 academic libraries in the state of Illinois. Northwestern, Loyola, and the University of Chicago are not a part of this consortium. The library also has member agreement with the University of Chicago that grants faculty borrowing privileges at the Crear Library.

 

In addition, the Library offers Info Passes to a number of Libraries that are not available to faculty and students on a walk-in basis.

 

Electronic Journals:

 

The Library has access to 72 databases in most IIT disciplines. These databases offer access to 4,200 full text journals. As funds and staff are made available, we will continue to offer access to additional journals.

 

 

                                               

 

Response to BCPS Faculty Concerns

 

Electronic Journals

 

Certainly a big part of the problem is lack of money to buy needed journals. But, part of the problem is access and awareness. While there is no argument that we need more journals, we might need fewer than faculty generally feel we do. As noted in a memo, we spend $400K for 412 subscriptions. Based on interviews made by the Associate Dean, Chuck Wenger, last spring, another $300-400K seems reasonable.

 

Access

 

We are currently too short on labor to provide an accurate and updated list of journal holdings-both print and electronic. We have worked towards this, but we need a full-time dedicated staff member for a long-term effortÑnot the bits and pieces that weÕve had to get by with. (There have been a number of times when patrons have complained about our not having a journal, when, in fact, we did. They just did not know where it was or how to access it.) This is partly the responsibility of publishers who are holding onto their products so that (as noted in the table below) we have nearly 20 different databases of full-text journals, about half of which could reasonably be queried for any subject to see whether or not a particular database has a particular journal.

 

Awareness

 

It may be useful for faculty members to give us lists of their most needed journalsÐe.g. the top 20 or so and let us try to find them. We might see that we have many that they need but are unaware that we have. From a list of 20 that they think we donÕt have, one may be found in electronic databases such as Academic Press, two more in Elsevier, one in WilsonSelect, one in OCLC ArticleFirst, etc. This will take some searching since there is no complete journal list.

 

A member of the department said, Òthose of us in the life sciences almost donÕt bother to look any moreÓ. That said perhaps something could be worked out with librarians attending dept meetings annually to provide them with updates of resources. And, we encourage faculty to communicate their journal needs to us so we could work on obtaining the most relevant journals.

 

Strategy

 

We are attempting to build core collections for all departments with graduate programs as well as a strong collection to service the undergraduate students. In many cases we have to take the deals that are offered us by consortia because of the enormous price advantages. (e.g. We looked at ACS journals about 3-4 years ago and the cost was about $60,000 for the entire set, a large sum of money which we could not afford. Two years later the database minus about 10 journals (of about 50) was available via a consortium for around $30,000.)

 

We have recently added all the journals that are available full-text in PsycINFO, the primary database for the field of Psychology. In the last year or two weÕve added major ACS and ACM journal collections. Next week, we hook up to 1,200 journals from ScienceDirect (Elsevier), thus adding about 70 journals in the Life Sciences. (However, we must pay $15/article to Elsevier after the first 1,500 articles have been downloaded. To keep control of costs we are restricting Elsevier to library access only. Based on our experiment last year of making it available to the campus, we could easily have 4,500 articles downloaded for a cost to us of an additional $45,000ÑthatÕs why we will keep it in Galvin.)

 

Galvin Library has added about 4,000 electronic journals since 1997. It is noteworthy that the table below shows over 7,000 full-text electronic journals. A comprehensive, accurate list of all journals accessible thru Galvin is needed, but to develop an accurate list of titles and holdings is a full-time job for several years. We have 7,000 records here in a very fluid environment (databases suppliers adding and losing journals every year) plus over 9,000 records of print journals. A full-time permanent serials librarian is needed to handle this in addition to a library technician support of at least 20 hours/week.

 

The Head of Technical Services was checking all of our print subscriptions to see which ones were available electronically. That position has been vacant for a while and has been put on hold due to a hiring freeze. The new Head will take up that project again when hired.

 

The number of journals in each of the major online databases (approximate counts):

 

Academic Press                                                        175

American Chemical Society                                        40

American Society for Civil Engineering                      30

American Society of Mechanical Engineers                20       

Association for Computing Machinery                      30

Blackwell Science                                                        200

EBSCO                                                                       1,800

IEEE                                                                            150

Institute of Physics                                                    10

OCLC ArticleFirst                                                      Unknown

Project Muse                                                              40

ProQuest Direct                                                          2,300

PsycINFO                                                                  500

Science Direct

            Elsevier                                                           1,100

society journals                                            100

SIAM                                                                          10

Wilson Select                                                           800

 

 

The use statistics for our database has gone up tremendously. Please find below the

number of hits on each of the databases.

 

 

 

 

 

 Database

Uses

Type

# of Months

Avg. Hits/Month

Extrapolated to 12 Months-2000

ACS

434

Page Views

3

145

1,736

Blackwell Science

157

Page Views

9

17

209

Books in Print

477

Page Views

12

40

477

Compendex

6,956

Searches

7

994

11,925

 

7,378

Full Records

7

1,054

12,648

 

113,330

Citations

7

16,190

194,280

Current Contents

1,594

Page Views

12

133

1,594

EI Villiage

257

Page Hits

8

32

386

 

1

Alerts

8

0

2

ERIC

488

Page Views

12

41

488

GPO MoCat

147

Searches

11

13

160

 

49

Logons

5

10

118

IEEE

5,675

Searches

5

1,135

13,620

IoP

2,005

Articles

7

286

3,437

IRIS

181

Searches

11

16

197

ITKnowledge

5,102

Page Views

2

2,551

30,612

 

382

Sessions

2

191

2,292

MathSciNet

403

Requests

6

67

806

Medline

865

Logons

11

79

944

 

302

Searches

5

60

725

NetFirst

228

Logons

11

21

249

 

116

Searches

5

23

278

NetLibrary

222

Book Accesses

7

32

381

OCLC ArticleFirst

1,667

Logons

11

152

1,819

 

1,396

Searches

5

279

3,350

OCLC Contents First

212

Logons

11

19

231

 

73

Searches

5

15

175

OCLC Papers First

422

Logons

11

38

460

 

335

Searches

5

67

804

OCLC Proceedings First

169

Logons

11

15

184

 

119

Searches

5

24

286

PAIS

104

Page Views

12

9

104

ProQuest Direct

59,867

Page Views

11

5,442

65,309

PsychInfo

2,661

Page Views

12

222

2,661

WilsonSelect

2,404

Logons

11

219

2,623

 

2,833

Searches

5

567

6,799

WorldCat

5,664

Logons

11

515

6,179

 

4,119

Searches

5

824

9,886

Total Searches

 

 

 

 

148,240

Top Performers 2000

 

 

 

 

 

ProQuest Direct

59,867

Page Views

11

5,442

65,309

ITKnowledge

5,102

Page Views

2

2,551

30,612

IEEE

5,675

Searches

5

1,135

13,620

Compendex

6,956

Searches

7

994

11,925

WorldCat

5,664

Logons

11

515

6,179

IoP

2,005

Articles

7

286

3,437

PsychInfo

2,661

Page Views

12

222

2,661

WilsonSelect

2,404

Logons

11

219

2,623

 

 

Cataloging journals in LC

 

The majority of academic libraries around the nation shelve journals in alphabetical order, in accordance with AACR2 standards. We are no exception.

 

If just print journals are to be cataloged in LC, the collection has to be rearranged. At that point, weÕre probably looking at hundreds of thousand of dollars to perform this task. If we are to use LC, we would need several professional movers full-time for several weeks. This would be a costly change. Given available financial resources, it seems like a better expenditure of funds at this time would be to focus on improving the journal collection, the access, and the awareness.

 

Given the rules we are bound to use, journals physical placement on shelves will change if a change in title occurs. In the past, we used AACR1 where titles were shelved by the association or societyÕs name. At this point, journals are being re-shelved in a title order. We have a plan to reorder all the shelves some time soon. The process will take a long time as our journal collection is more than 250,000 volumes.

 

 Journals in the Life Sciences

 

Life Sciences are on the agenda to develop a core collection. We had hoped that Blackwell Science database would help (a lot of medical journals-some in the biosciences). Elsevier has about 72 journals in 13 categories of the biosciences.

 

At this point, I would like to ask the life sciences professors to give us a list of important journals that we can check against our various databases.

 

The library offers a great deal of services to all members of the community. I would appreciate it if you can examine our web site www.gl.iit.edu for additional information. I am currently working on a new format for our annual report. I will be happy to send you a copy when it is ready for distribution.

 

Hope this information helps the committee. If you need additional information, please donÕt hesitate to ask.

 

Regards,

 

Sohair