Collections

LITS Annual Report 2004-2005

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New selectors. Before the start of the 04/05 academic year, we shifted some responsibilities for selecting library materials to more members of the Research and Instructional Support team. We hope this shift enables faculty to have a single point of contact in RIS for many of the resources related to the support of the curriculum. In many cases the person offering library instruction or consulting on technology and multimedia projects is also the person developing the collection in that discipline. The shift also allowed us to tap the subject expertise of RIS team members.

Approval plan. In last year’s report, we had expected to shift the approval plan from slip notification to actual shipments of books by this time. With the changes in our selector assignments, we decided not to rush ahead, in order to provide the new selectors some time to “learn the ropes”. In April D. Bonner joined LITS as the Head of Technical Services and one of her first tasks has been to review our vendor performance. That analysis will continue and may result in some changes. For that reason, we will maintain our current procedures for the short term.

New periodicals. It is no longer news that periodical prices continue to rise at rates above inflation and above our budget allocations. When we have received requests for periodicals, we have in the past treated them all equally; faculty were asked to review existing holdings to free up funds for new titles, regardless of the price tag. We recognized that practice was not particularly fair so we decided to try an experiment of simply purchasing journals that met the following criteria: low cost (under $100/year); support for the curriculum; not available electronically. Through the pilot period, we added 5 titles: Journal of Research in Music Education; Journal of Singing; Political and Legal Anthropology Review; Strings; Thinking. We plan to continue the program, reserving the option to postpone an addition if the requests exceed the budget.

Electronic resources. During the past academic year, we added the following electronic resources to our holdings:

ArtStor: A repository of hundreds of thousands of digital images and related data. The Charter Collection documents artistic traditions across many times and cultures and embraces architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design as well as many other forms of visual culture

Ethnic NewsWatch: An interdisciplinary, bilingual (English and Spanish) and comprehensive full text database of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press.

JSTOR Arts and Sciences IV: 100 titles in Law, Psychology, and Public Policy and Adminstration

Naxos Music Library is a collection of classical music available online. It includes the complete Naxos, Marco Polo and Dacapo catalogues of over 85,000 tracks, including Classical music, Jazz, World, Folk and Chinese music. It also includes notes on the works being played as well as biographical information on composers or artists in Naxos's extensive database.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: “50,000 biographies of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond, from the earliest times to the year 2001.” In addition to new and revised entries, the online version includes the fulltext of the previous editions, making it possible to compare entries side-by-side.

Safari: a collection of ebooks from O’Reilly on technology topics such as database design, security, graphic design as well as specific programming languages.

U.S. Congressional Serial Set: The Reports, Documents, and Journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. A rich source of primary source material on all aspects of American history.

In addition, we moved subscription from print or microfilm to electronic versions of these titles:

Biography and Geneaology Masterfile
Books in Print
Ulrichs directory of periodicals
Wall Street Journal

Weeding. Regular visitors to the Williston stacks may have noticed that the amount of “elbow room” has been descreasing as our print book collection has grown over the years. In an effort to create some space to make it possible to shelve new books, last summer we began a modest weeding project. On this initial pass, our focus has been on duplicate copies that have had low circulation. Last summer we were able to remove approximately 1000 volumes from levels 1 and 2 of the Williston stacks. The project continues this summer.

Prepared by
Kathleen Norton
July 2005