North Carolina State University Libraries

Annual Report, 2005/2006

I. PROGRAMS

A. Changes in Scope of Activities

Major activities during 2005/2006 focused on improving access to the library and its collections. With the renovation of the D. H. Hill Library's East Wing well under way, maintaining access to essential services posed challenges throughout the year. Well-planned relocations, however, minimized disruptions for users, and in early 2007 the university community can look forward to taking advantage of an expanded Special Collections Research Center and a new technology-enriched Learning Commons. In the virtual arena, implementation of a new website and the first Endeca-powered online catalog vastly improved the discovery process for the library's resources and services.

B. Volume of Activities: NCSU Libraries Statistics (04/05, 03/04, 99/00, 94/95)

Collection Statistics

Library Services

Library Services (continued), Expenditures, and ARL Ranking

For footnotes, see Appendix A at end.

C. Special Achievements of Significance (see also Section II, Compact)

• Launched a lending service for digital audio players, in conjunction with the addition of over 1,000 digital audio books added to the collection.
• Implemented WolfBlogs, a blog hosting service designed to support the personal, curricular, and scholarly communication activities of students, faculty, and staff.
• Launched a numeric data listerv to share information with those who are interested and engaged in research with numeric data.
• Converted all public photocopiers and printers to WolfCopy to reduce costs of services. Students now have access to upgraded equipment and to a system that requires only one value-added copy card. As a convenience for students, D. H. Hill Library provided space for WolfCopy's print quota staff at the circulation desk. The Libraries abolished its separate Photocopy Services unit, eliminating 3.0 FTE positions and integrating its document reproduction and delivery service into Interlibrary and Document Delivery Services.
• Established the NCSU Libraries Student Advisory Group.
• As part of the University Honors Program, taught the seminar "Academic Research Strategies and Contexts" for the second year.
• Purchased a Segway Human Transporter to make urgent deliveries of library materials to office and building locations around campus.
• Raised approximately $1,000,000 in private monetary gifts and in-kind donations.
• Awarded Dr. Elisabeth Wheeler, professor emerita, Department of Wood and Paper Science, the 2005 NCSU Libraries Faculty Award. Wheeler has collaborated with a team of NCSU librarians and technical staff in securing funding and in creating the InsideWood database, which has incorporated data and images from scientists throughout the world.
• Hosted two traveling exhibits from the Smithsonian: Diana Walker: Photojournalist and Feast Your Eyes: The Unexpected Beauty of Vegetable Gardens.
• Mounted Wolfpack Baseball: A History of Achievement, a photographic exhibition drawing on the University Archives, to celebrate Coach Elliott Avent's tenth season.
• Sponsored several speakers through the Friends of the Library (FOL), including Jan Karon, Emyl Jenkins, Martin Clark, Angela Davis-Gardner, and Mary Schweitzer (fall luncheon).
• Held a "Home Run" FOL spring dinner featuring Frank Deford, award-winning sports journalist and senior contributing writer at Sports Illustrated; Deford was introduced by Coach Avent.
• Delved into several "hot" topics at the I. T. Littleton seminar, where cultural historian and media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan spoke on the Google book search debate.
• As part of NC State's Achieve! Campaign, held an informative and entertaining "Carousel of Knowledge" kickoff event on the Brickyard.

D. Special Program Reviews, Studies, or Plans: Completed detailed plans for a new Learning Commons in the East Wing, and gathered feedback from faculty and students (including the University Library Committee) about the new services.

II. COMPACT PLAN

Critical Space Needs of the NCSU Libraries (Initiative 1)

• Embarked on Phase I of the Libraries' Master Plan to improve the quality and quantity of both collaborative and quiet study space. Project goals include upgrading the entire East Wing's building infrastructure, expanding the Special Collections Research Center, and introducing a technology-enriched Learning Commons.
• Used the East Wing renovation as an opportunity to reexamine the use of space throughout the building and to relocate some materials and services in ways that better prepare the library for the future. Developed plans to relocate the microforms from the East to the West Wing, allowing consolidation of two service points into one and the relocation of Information Technology personnel to the Learning and Research Center for the Digital Age.
• Completed renovation of the staff and storage area of the Special Collections Research Center; acquired and installed furniture and compact shelving units, and upgraded security in the area.
• Explored options for offsite storage of materials. The overall space crisis continues to escalate, and offsite storage still poses a major challenge.
• Welcomed the university's announcement that a new 200,000 gross square foot library on Centennial Campus will be named in honor of James B. Hunt, Jr.

Top 25 Ranking (Initiative 2)

• Became eligible to submit ETF funding requests (see Initiative 5).

Collections for Researchers and Students (Initiative 3)

• Received a $221,000 allocation for inflation from the State of North Carolina. Since this allocation only partially offsets the annual impact of inflation on the collections ($525,000), the Libraries was forced to cancel 800 journal titles to mitigate the loss of purchasing power. Cancellations were done based on in-depth consultations with faculty.
• Through efficient stewardship and one-time appropriations to enhance digital collections and programs, added over 1 million electronic journal articles and 10,000 electronic books to the research collection. Additions to electronic resources included back volumes of Nature and Nature research journals; back-file packages of online journals from Elsevier and Wiley publishers; two major chemical engineering encyclopedias; and ARTstor, a collection of images documenting art, design, architecture, history, and culture.
• In the Special Collections Research Center, added papers from prominent faculty members (Ron Sederoff, Jim Riviere, C. Clark Cockerham, and Charles William Stuber) and built collections in areas of excellence such as plant and forestry genomics and veterinary medicine.
• Using a leading collection analysis tool from OCLC, compared amounts of overlap and uniqueness in the collections of UNC-CH, Duke, NCCU, and NCSU. Results indicate that ongoing cooperation among the TRLN libraries has yielded high levels of unique holdings. More than 71 percent of the aggregate TRLN collections are unique to a single institution, while only 2 percent of records overlap at all four institutions. Subjects with the highest percentage and number of unique titles correspond to areas of identified collecting commitments.
• Continued to play a leadership role in NC LIVE, a statewide electronic resource project. Teams negotiated and managed a 50% increase in funds (approximately one million dollars); an expanded slate of licensed resources, including digital audio books, was implemented in January.

Student Learning in a Technology-Rich Environment (Initiative 4)

• Throughout the year surveyed users of the Collaboratory in the Learning and Research Center for the Digital Age in accordance with the LITRE Quality Enhancement Plan. Results will inform planning for the Learning Commons.
• Collaborated with Communication Technologies (ComTech) to design and install full wireless networking coverage for the D. H. Hill Library. The two units shared funding, with support from Education and Technology Fee (ETF) funds. Library users will now have ubiquitous wireless network access throughout the entire building, a great stride forward in providing a technology-rich environment.

The "Commons" Infrastructure (Initiative 5)

• Received $140,000 in one-time Education and Technology Fee (ETF) funds in response to a proposal to outfit the Learning Commons with state-of-the-art technology for students.
• Began construction on the Learning Commons and hired a director for the service. Opening of the Learning Commons is anticipated in early 2007.

A Library Faculty that Reflects a Diverse University Community (Initiative 6) (See also Section III)

• Participated in the Council on Library and Information Resources' (CLIR) national lateral entry program, Bringing Scholars into Academic Library Careers. The program enables recent PhDs in the humanities to gain credentials as librarians.
• Partnered with the TRLN libraries and the UNC-CH School of Information and Library Science in a program funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to prepare doctoral students to teach academic librarianship.
• Tito Sierra has been selected to participate in the 2006 Minnesota Institute for Early Career Librarians. The Institute, designed for librarians from racial and ethnic groups traditionally underrepresented in the library profession, provides training and networking opportunities.
• Two of the three NCSU Libraries Fellows' appointments are from underrepresented groups.

Next-Generation Digital Library (Initiative 7)

• Deployed the first Endeca-powered online catalog (http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/endeca/), which earned praise from students and faculty at the university as well as from the national library community. The new catalog allows users to find items of interest in the library's collection quickly and easily through powerful search and browse functionalities. Notable features include the ability to browse new books and to limit retrieval sets by format, location, or subject focus.
• Implemented a new library website in August 2005, with popular features such as QuickSearch, Browse Subjects, and Frequently Asked Questions. From June 2005 through May 2006, users retrieved over 15,267,000 pages, a 28% increase over 2004/05.
• Received additional funding ($243,039) from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to add fossil wood information to InsideWood, the world's largest database for wood anatomy.
• Received a two-year grant ($49,992 in year one) from the NC ECHO program (funded by the Library Services and Technology Act) to digitize items in the Special Collections Research Center related to the history of agriculture and extension. The grant is supporting the digitization of over 12,000 documents and photographs.
• Began work on the "Living off the Land" website in the Special Collections Research Center. The site will provide digital access to collections of rare and unique items on tobacco and crop science history in North Carolina dating from 1850 though 1950. The project is supported by the North Carolina Farm Bureau ($10,000), the North Carolina Tobacco Research Commission ($15,000), and the North Carolina Tobacco Foundation ($4,867).
• Under a continuing cooperative agreement with the Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and the NC Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, developed a model for digital preservation for geospatial data.
• Migrated the NC State University Authors Database to the Libraries' new Digital Repository interface and infrastructure. This will allow the database to include the full text of selected publications, as well as the current bibliographic records.

Business Continuity for University Records (Initiative 10)

• Participated in the LITRE-sponsored report of the Digital Asset Management Task Force. The report recommends the implementation of a digital asset management system infrastructure and calls for the Libraries to lead this effort.
• Internally, reviewed the UNC System Records Retention and Disposition Schedule to identify sections and records series relevant to the Libraries and any gaps that need to be addressed.

III. DIVERSITY: INITIATIVES AND PROGRESS (see also Compact Initiative 6):

*Staff in Access and Delivery Services received training on best practices in customer service and created a customer service standards document. NC State Human Resources Employee and Organizational Development staff conducted the training. *Jose Picart, vice provost for African American Affairs, and Laura Gonzalez, First Year College, discussed the results of the NCSU Latino Student Survey with library staff. *The Libraries' Diversity Committee, the College of Natural Resources, and the Office of Diversity and African American Affairs co-sponsored a lecture by Jim Johnson, William Rand Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill. Johnson analyzed several demographic trends in his talk entitled "People and Jobs on the Move: Implications for Higher Education." *A panel consisting of Assoc. Vice Provost Cheryl Branker, Visiting Lecturer Walter Lackey, and Reference Librarian Katherine Willis discussed the challenges facing disabled students and colleagues and highlighted campus and library services designed to accommodate their varied needs.

IV. STAFF

A. Major New Appointments: Monica McCormick (formerly editor with the University of California Press) as director of digital publishing; Joe Williams (formerly manager for Education and Technology Services in the Medical Sciences Library at Texas A&M University) as director of the NCSU Libraries' new Learning Commons.

B. Kudos, Professional Activities, and Recognition: The NCSU Libraries received the 2006 Endeca Navigator award. * Peggy Hoon was appointed as the Association of Research Libraries' visiting scholar for campus copyright and intellectual property projects as part of the Copyright Education Initiative. *Emily Lynema was awarded a Digital Library Federation (DLF) Fellowship for Librarians New to the Profession. *Andrew Pace was named a 2006 Frye Leadership Institute Fellow. The program focuses on creative leadership and the qualities needed to confront strategic changes in higher education. *Library Journal designated Tito Sierra as one of its 2006 "Movers and Shakers who are transforming libraries for the future."

V. RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCERNS FOR THE FUTURE

• Delay in construction of the James B. Hunt, Jr. Library on Centennial Campus will jeopardize the university's goals of meeting current and future enrollment needs and of providing a technology-rich environment for students and faculty. In the short term addressing the escalating pressures for off-site storage of collections essential for research will place an unsustainable burden on the Libraries' operating budget.
• Severe inflationary pressures are eroding the library's purchasing power for collections by 8 to 10 percent ($500,000+) annually. Inflation, combined with consecutive years of budget cuts, is taking its toll. New sources of funding must be found if the university is to maintain the strength of the collections, which are highly valued by faculty and students and which are integral to the success of the university's mission.
• The Libraries has been aggressive and successful in attracting outstanding talent through a variety of initiatives and programs. However, recruitment and retention of information professionals, particularly in the sciences and in underrepresented groups, continues to be a challenge. In addition, personnel classification of library support positions is woefully outdated and does not recognize the impact of profound changes in the field of information science and knowledge management in the past 30 years. For both professional and support personnel, funds are needed to implement salary adjustments for retention and to offer competitive salaries for recruitment.

Appendix A: Footnotes to NCSU Libraries Statistics

a) includes NC LIVE resources

b) includes circulation of reserve materials, both print and (beginning in 1998/99) electronic

c) excludes benefits