Setting:
Johnson University Library of Johnson
College in Johnson City was founded in 1833 as an independent (private),
coeducational liberal arts school. The college currently enrolls
3000 undergraduate students with 325 faculty.
Stakeholders:
Mission Statement:
The library's mission is to provide access to the information and resources
that faculty, community, and students need to support teaching, research
and other scholarly pursuits.
Scenario:
The media and technology vendors
present a picture of Internet as user friendly, authoritative, and all
inclusive. With these customer expectations, what is the role of the library?
One decision maker asked, "After all, Harvard University has everything
on the computer, so why should we bother to have a library?"
"Case" and Supporting Evidence:
Physical resources: Johnson Library
consists of the main library and three satellite libraries, specializing
in art, music, and science. The Library has approximately 1.7 million
items in such physical items as books, manuscripts, microform, and music
scores. Their nationally-known collection is among the strongest of liberal
arts college libraries and unusually large for the University’s size. Historical
richness of the collections is reflected in excellent holdings of the nineteenth-century
American periodicals, general exploration and travel accounts, antislavery
and Spanish drama collections. The library’s music holdings, include outstanding
collections in music history and collected editions of composers’ works.
Other areas of collection strength include African-American Studies, Art
and Art History, East Asian Studies, renaissance and eighteenth-century
English Literature Religion and Women’s Studies.
Virtual resources: All libraries are hooked together into one virtual web site, providing seamless access of students and faculty from their on-campus or off-campus residences, CD-ROM networks, electronic texts, both statewide and Johnson Library online catalog systems, as well as librarian/faculty-selected Internet resources to augment printed resources.
To meet these needs, the Library is committed to developing the most sophisticated sources of information in all formats within the limits of its resources. It actively seeks new professionals and re-educates its current staff and librarians in meeting the challenge of quantum leaps in information management brought on by rapid technological advancement. This provides enhanced user accessibility and added flexibility, permitting the Library to rapidly adjust to changing technology and information needs. Therefore, the library actively seeks to maintain a collection in a wide variety of formats. To increase its collection, it has joined a statewide program to link libraries together. Patrons can search and request material from any state-supported library in Johnson State, as well as share a wide variety of other digital resources.
To best serve the interest of their patrons, the Library maintains a copy of an identified resource for every 10-20 students. Copies may be in print, digital or electronic format as determined by user demand and in consultation with the teaching faculty and the Library. It maintains a highly visible profile on the Internet through its Web home page, permitting access to its digital resources (electronic journals, electronic texts, databases, indexes) both general and geared toward specific courses of instruction through the Internet. Simultaneously, the Library recognizes that digital resources can be vaporous commodities and serves the community by providing only those resources that are stable Internet sites with high quality scholarly material specifically collected and annotated to meet the needs of its faculty and staff. In a corollary, the Library is actively involved in developing preservation tools for its electronic and digital resources, while maintaining an active print collection for archiving for future needs as much as possible.
To see a list of Journals subscribed to by Johnson University Library of which most are, unfortunately, unavailable online, click here.
The Library is also charged with supporting the policies of Johnson University, including its Community Initiative Program (CIP). The Library provides CIP with information needs, as well as acting as a consulting agency for an academic assistance program from fourth grade through high school for Johnson City students. These efforts include preparing students for state-required proficiency tests and enhancing computer, reading and math skills for Johnson City students where 26 percent of the population live below the poverty level.
The Library becomes a cultural and meeting center for all students/staff/faculty. It has set aside reading rooms for specific subjects: Physics, Music, Asian American Resource Center. Besides offering computer instruction and access, integrating information resources needed by the University faculty and staff, Johnson University Library provides the facilities, hosts and acts as a facilitator in bringing together leaders from the community, national experts and University faculty to hold weekly public brainstorming sessions to find ways to diminish the digital divide, to determine policy and then to provide programs and act as an information resource center to locate equipment, staff and resource to decrease the "digital divide" that currently separates a large part of the community from its more affluent members.
Some patrons may not have access to a computer, due to income or a form of disability. Approximately 50% of US households have subscribed to the Internet. Johnson University and its stakeholders are actively committed to reducing the growing "digital divide" in its own community. In order to do so, it has charged the Library with the role of providing access to computers for those that do not have access.
As an extension of these community services, "the library staff is available to assist all library users in finding information, developing strategies for conducting effective library research, and learning how to use the library and its resources. Library staff will attempt to accommodate the special needs of its users who identify themselves as disabled, differently-abled, or specially challenged and will provide assistance that overcomes barriers to accomplishing tasks in the Library that most users can do for themselves". The library has workstations for users with disabilities which include the following: Braille writers, Power Braille (converts text into Braille), and Jaws (voice software).
Johnson Library has developed a Library/Faculty
Liaison Program in order to increase faculty awareness of our collection,
online collections, and services,
and address faculty information needs. Our librarians are trained
to develop research
components for individual classes,
thereby assisting the university in offering the most up-to-date and complete
information for
each area of interest. Faculty,
as well, are encouraged to help develop collections by recommending titles
and subject areas. These items are then offered to students free of charge
through reserves.
Johnson Library loans out technical equipment for the specific needs of
faculty, and offers a wide assortment of audio-visual and computer related
systems in order to best serve the needs of the classroom.
Johnson Library has multi-language print/electronic resources with translation capabilities. Resources from all over the world in foreign languages are collected and catalogued according to the LC classification and transliteartion schemes. For example, our catalogue allows searching in English for information available in most languages without requiring a translator or knowledge of that language. Conversely, our catalogue offers the same information to those students whose primary language is not English.
The purpose of library catalogues is to locate books and other physical information resources which are impossible to put on the Internet, as in collections, periodicals, magazines in their entirety, entire texts and in rare books collections. In libraries, such as Harvard Library, the use of stacks and non-circulating collections is limited to those with special privliges or permission, such as carriers of the Harvard ID, members of the Harvard Museum, alumni, visiting researchers, and a limited used from the general public. The location of these items can be found on the Internet and are described in summary form.
While use of the Internet is a function of all libraries, even Harvard, with its 13.4 million library books which support 18,000 students continues to procure new collections for their stacks. It is well known to be the largest offering of physical information resources in the world with an operating budget of $91 million for the library and an university endowment fund in the hundreds of millions. Harvard provides 744 books for every student enrolled in hundreds of subject areas. At a library operating budget at 4% of Harvard's Johnson library supplies its patrons with 566 for each student. While we can't compare the two universities, we would like to note each libraries' committment to print.
In the age of Internet, the increase of library use surged when the Internet access became offered. Our circulation of books and other printed formats in our stacks continues to be in increasing high demand, even as we offer scholarly Internet, electronic and digital resources. Last year circulation transactions amounted to 1,160,580 This is for a variety of reasons:
a. Many journals have only been accessible in electronic format for the latter part of this last decade. If you want a resource from 1992, for example, you have to have access a print copy. Online (Internet) materials are limited to those information resources that are recent. The average life span of web sites is 75 days. Therefore, we still maintain printed versions of many electronic journals simply so that our faculty, staff, students, community and stakeholders will have access to that material 10 years from to continue Johnson’s University’s commitment to quality education.
b. Very few scholarly and educational materials taught in schools and universities are available on the Internet. Only recently, publishers have recently begun to augment their textbooks with CD-ROM and Web-based interface access to textbooks. Johnson Library works closely with its faculty to provide the material the faculty chooses for learning. If this includes the needs for digital resources, we provide it. However, statistics show 85% of our faculty continue to base their pedagogy on textbooks augmented at times with publisher-provided electronic or digital material, as well as Internet resources requested from the Library. Johnson Library continues to strive, at the directive of Johnson University and its stakeholders, to offer its faculty, students and community, only the best resources to guarantee a superior learning process and provide a foundation for cutting-edge research. It strives to be innovative and stay on top of technological developments. Since the Library develops these resources in close consultation with its faculty, it is clear that the faculty predominantly seek resources for teaching and research outside the web environment. Our faculty and librarians are the experts in their respective fields and have been sought out for their expertise.
c. Resources created by publishers are not free, be they digital or not. Electronic resources although less expensive than print, are still expensive and they are not available over the Internet to a customer unless s/he purchases a yearly subscription. Digital journal articles cannot be accessed through web search engines. Even if they were Internet available (through a fee-for view service, for example, which is very different from a fee-for-download service), no single individual could ever have the financial ability to hold all the resources a library can offer. A library is that one place where a customer can access everything, for free, by simply walking through the door.
Like the Harvard Library system, Johnson Library is strongly committed to supplying their students with the resources in all formats through an aggressive collection development policy that fully integrates all users, including the stakeholders, into that decision making process. This clearly shows in the quality and quantity of the library resources and in the success of our student users once they leave the university with their degrees.
In summary, Johnson University is
strongly committed to pedagogy and developing supporting technology. It
is at the Library that this happens at Johnson University. Technology,
pedagogy, and information all intersect at this one place. By not only
providing the best information resources, but individual study carrels,
reading rooms, audio-visual facilities, computer stations with interactive
and multimedia learning modules, and group study areas, all with network
connections, Johnson Library is a knowledge transfer center: between individual
students and their study material regardless of format, as well as between
people and people.
Group Members:
Heather Bell
Olha Buchel
Jennifer Haberkorn
Marilyn Hudson-Tremayne
Diane Rein