Libraries Make Progress in 2000-2002    

by Tom Wilding

In addition to the major job of restructuring, we accomplished many specific things in the last two years. The following are some of them.

Electronic Reserves. After a pilot program in the summer of 2001, we launched electronic reserves as a full-scale service, but not without its problems. On the one hand, being able to deliver course related readings digitally increases access to these materials and actually increases the number and frequency of uses by students. On the other, our experience has been like those of other libraries in the difficulty of obtaining permission from publishers to scan copyrighted materials, and this has been a frustration to students, faculty, and library staff. These difficulties will eventually work themselves out, but in the meantime we are in unsettled territory.

Digital Delivery of Interlibrary Loan Materials. We implemented a service for users to provide digital access to some interlibrary loan materials. Articles that we receive digitally are placed on a website for customers to view, download, or print, thus speeding access to materials by a day or more. The response of users of interlibrary loan services has been very positive.

Laptops on Loan. During 2000-2001. we purchased laptops to circulate to customers who either didn’t own laptops or hadn’t brought their own with them. We were able to use grant funds for the initial batch of laptops. While slow to take off, during the spring of 2002, laptops were in constant use and queues were developing for them. We added more, and the demand grew more. We created a wireless environment and made the laptops adaptable to wireless use. This has meant that a student could take a laptop and use it almost anywhere in a library space to do research as well as use the standard office software products. This made the laptops even more in demand.

Faster Reshelving. Thanks to the ingenuity of some staff, we were able to reduce the time it takes to get books and other materials that come back from circulation to reach the shelves and be available to another user from 1 to 2 days to 2 to 3 hours, and at the same time reduced the number of shelvers who do it…a double hit!

Access from Outside. We made it easier for customers who are eligible to use licensed electronic resources from off campus locations to authenticate themselves and gain access to the desired resource without having to do any reconfiguration of their own computers.

Digital Media Classroom. What began as a one-user-at-a-time service to provide some assistance to faculty who needed to learn new “teaching with technology” tools, ended 2001/2002 as a fourteen seat classroom where both faculty and students can explore the use of leading edge technologies and how they might be useful in teaching and learning.

Digital Production. We developed a digital production unit that can perform a range of activities in creating digital products, from scanning printed materials for reserves to streaming audio and video of oral histories.

UTA Libraries Online. We continued to enrich the contents of the Libraries’ website. Over 2.167 million web page views were recorded during 2000-2001.

Information Literacy. We developed an information literacy program and began to work with several foundational programs to try to reach the maximum number of students early in their academic careers. We quickly established partnerships with faculty teaching large enrollment freshman and sophomore classes in English, Biology, and Health Education.

Geographic Information Systems. We launched a service to support students in the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software onsite in Ransom Hall and to begin to market GIS to other academic programs that can effectively make use of this tool. During the summer of 2002, the GIS lab was moved from Ransom Hall to the 5th floor of the Central Library.

Cataloging. We still do catalog traditional books and journals and, with the exception of large backlogs of materials in Special Collections, this is up to date. Bibliographic records for electronic resources enter our online catalog through both human and automated channels. The staff who have been building our catalog are using those same skills and competencies to build other databases that can provide access for users to information resources, especially digital resources and other specialized materials.

Grants. The Libraries received three grant awards out of the four applications submitted. Grant funds were received to catalog and digitize the audiotapes of seventy-eight oral histories of leaders from the Mexican-American community, which had been conducted by Dr. Jose Angel Gutierrez and placed in Special Collections. This project, called Tejano Voices, created a website to provide users of the oral histories easy access to the interviews. Another grant funded the extension of preservation activities to some of the photographic negatives of the W.D. Smith Collection. During the summer of 2001, we were notified of the award of a $413,000 grant from the Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund to enhance our growing information literacy and instruction programs and to redesign UTA Libraries Online to provide customizable access to library services and resources.

Special Collections Guide. Staff in Special Collections concluded a three-year project to revise the guide to archives and manuscripts in Special Collections and to mount a web-based version of the guide. http://libraries.uta.edu/SpecColl/findaids/guideIntr.htm

Digital Reference. We began to experiment with a number of ways of providing reference services to library customers who either cannot or do not come to the Libraries’ physical spaces. Additional self-help tools were developed for the website, and we joined in national programs to develop these services that could be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. While in its infancy, this service will be growing to maturity in the next couple of years.

Sam’s Click Cafe. The year 2000/2001 saw the first full year of service of Sam’s Click Café, a joint project of the Libraries and the Office of Information Technology, with the participation of the Campus Dining Services. A 36-seat open access computer lab was opened on the first floor of the Central Library, adjacent to an Information Technology Help Desk and a coffee bar. Designed to be a space that rivaled some of the modern bookstores, with comfortable seating and lighting, new book shelves, a cable TV news feed, coffee, and computer clusters that invited group work, Sam’s Click Café quickly became the most popular spot on campus. The average weekly gate count rose from 18,000 per week in 1999 to 29, 000 per week in 2000 and to 41,000 per week in 2001. Sam’s is a high energy learning community.

Quiet Sam’s. The fifth floor of the Central Library has for several years been designated as a quiet study area. No cell phones are allowed and users who don’t cooperate can be asked to leave the floor. Since Sam’s provides such wonderful group space in a noisy area, we felt it only fair to provide a facility of similar quality for our customers who need quiet space. At the end of the summer of 2002, we opened the 14-seat Quiet Sam’s on the fifth floor.

Books and Journals. The last two years have seen significant growth in the Libraries’ holdings of books and journals available for the UTA community. The book budget increased by 54%, from $410,000 to $633,000. The journal budget increased by 20%, from $1,825,000 to $2,193,000. We were able to continue to fund the inflation in journal literature. We added access to thousands of journals in digital formats, many with significant back files. The support of students for increases in the library service fee, increasing enrollments, and a number of successful consortial arrangements were primary enablers for this. The UTA community has never been so information rich. We anticipate reaching our long stated goal of a $750,000 book budget in the 2002/2003 budget year, although that does not account for inflation in the intervening years, but all the same we have made dramatic progress.