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NEWS FROM THE FIELD

C&RL News, September 2003
Vol. 64, No. 8

by Stephanie Orphan

First joint city/university library opens its doors
The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, the first of its kind in the nation to be jointly funded, managed, and operated by a metropolitan city and major university, opened its doors in August. The library, a collaboration between the City of San Jose and San Jose State University (SJSU), serves more than 30,000 students, faculty, and staff of SJSU, in addition to more than 918,800 residents of San Jose. The eight-story, 475,000-square-foot facility holds a collection of 1.3 million volumes, with room to grow to 2 million volumes. The idea for the new Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library was announced in 1997, with construction beginning in 2000. The increased access to information is expected to have a positive impact on the community, education, and Silicon Valley innovation.

SPARC announces Open Access Newsletter
The Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter, dormant since September 2002, is back in production as the monthly SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN). The newsletter will continue to be written by Peter Suber and will offer news and analysis of the open-access movement, the worldwide effort to disseminate scientific and scholarly research literature online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary licensing restrictions. In addition, the FOS Forum has become the SPARC Open Access Forum.

All subscribers to the FOS newsletter and forum have automatically been subscribed to the new SPARC editions. If you are not already a subscriber, instructions on how to receive the newsletter and join the forum are available online at www.arl.org/sparc/soa/index.html.

ASERL launches shared chat reference service
The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) has officially launched the first phase of its cooperative virtual reference service, linking users to staff at ten ASERL libraries. When the complete system goes live in January 2004, it will be the first Web-based reference service supported by research library staff across a region of the country.

The cooperative virtual reference system will allow patrons to use chat software to get reference help from research library experts seven days a week, 12 hours a day, with service hours added if there is demand. The system will use OCLC’s QuestionPoint software.

C&RL News seeks cartoonist
C&RL News is looking for a creative cartoonist to provide humorous drawings on academic librarianship and other higher education issues. Cartoons run each month in this column ("News from the Field") and are occasionally used to illustrate longer articles. This volunteer position is shared with another cartoonist, with individuals’ cartoons running in five to six issues per year.

If you’d like to have your cartoons spotlighted in C&RL News, please send samples (e-mail attachments or URLs are fine) to: Stephanie Orphan, Editor, C&RL News, 50 E. Huron, Chicago, IL 60611; e-mail: sorphan@ala.org.

Haworth Press introduces electronic access for all journals
The Haworth Press, Inc. announced a new service, E-Haworth, making all Haworth academic and professional journals available electronically. E-Haworth is available to all libraries with print subscriptions free of charge, providing site-wide online access to Haworth journals, with no restrictions on the number of users for either a specific issue or a specific journal title. A single academic library subscription will now serve multiple campus libraries, multiple on- and off-campus programs, faculty at home or in the office, and distance learning programs. Functionality includes 24/7 access; IP authentication; easy downloading, bookmarking, and searching of articles; and archival access in many instances.

2003 ACRL President Helen H. Spalding (left)
signed a cross-border agreement, on behalf of ACRL,
with Jane Phillips (right), on behalf of the Canadian
Association of College and University Libraries (CACUL),
during the joint ALA/CLA Annual Conference. The agreement
reaffirms a mutual commitment between ACRL and CACUL
to promote international activities among academic and
research librarians and educators. ACRL is signing a similar
agreement with the National Council of Higher Education
Libraries in Mexico and looks forward to working with
both organizations.

Johns Hopkins restores water-damaged books
Johns Hopkins University has contracted with Document Reprocessors of Middlesex, New York, the firm that helped dry out and restore books recovered from the Titanic, to rescue and restore between 6,000 and 8,000 books that were damaged in the George Peabody Library when an air conditioning unit drain pipe backed up, causing water to leak in the library stacks. The historic library, described as a "cathedral of books," has been closed since June 2002 for renovations. The leak occurred sometime during the first weekend in August 2003. Document Reprocessors is assisting staff by providing a freezer truck and crew of workers on site to box up affected books. Items will be freeze dried to remove the water at the company’s headquarters and leather bindings will be additionally treated to prevent warping.

The Peabody Library is scheduled to reopen in early 2004.

CHOICE offers compilation of Outstanding Academic Titles
CHOICE’s Outstanding Academic Titles, 1998–2002: Reviews of Scholarly Titles that Every Library Should Own, edited by Rebecca A. Bartlett, is now available from ACRL. This five-year compilation is an essential resource for all librarians and faculty involved with collection development. Outstanding Academic Titles includes the best in scholarly titles reviewed by CHOICE; the titles included are distinguished for their excellence in scholarship, relevance, and originality.

Previously named Outstanding Academic Books, the new name reflects an increase in review of electronic products and Internet sites.

For more information, or to order a copy of this and other ACRL titles, go to www.acrl.org and select "Publications Catalog" from the Quicklinks drop-down menu.

ALCTS metadata task force report available
The ALCTS Metadata Enrichment Task Force (METF) has made available the final draft of a report by Marcia Bates, "Improving User Access to Library Catalog and Portal Information." The report is available online at lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/actionplan.html. The document comprises a state-of-the-art review and recommendations regarding section 2.3 of the Library of Congress Bicentennial Action Plan. Recommendations include the development of a clustered vocabulary approach to melding natural language terms used by searchers with the many controlled vocabularies assigned to the works they are searching for. The report also provides an extensive review and bibliography that spotlights issues and research in the field of information seeking behavior. METF welcomes public comment on the report, which can be e-mailed to: 2_3@worktools.si.umich.edu. 

College of DuPage hosts Russian librarians
The College of DuPage (COD), in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, was host to five professional librarians from Russia for a week in May. The librarians were part of a larger delegation of Russian information specialists that came to the United States as part of the Open World Program, sponsored by the Center for Russian Leadership Development at the Library of Congress. The COD group learned about the day-to-day operations and frustrations at a large suburban community college library and conferred with staff of the DuPage Library System (DLS) about the roles and services of a state regional library system.

COD was hosting the Third Congress on Professional Education (COPE III) during the Russians’ visit, so they were able to sit in on some of the sessions, which focused on education, advancement, responsibilities, and compensation. The Russian librarians remarked that they were impressed by the large role of computerization and automation in United States libraries and the fact that our libraries are so patron-oriented. They also commented that they experience problems similar to those in the United States regarding the popular image of librarians.

Endeavor announces course content integrator
Endeavor Information Systems has developed the Course Content Integrator (CCI) to complement its ENCompass digital library system. The CCI is available for use with the Blackboard Learning System 6.0 Enterprise Edition and the WebCT VistaSystem. The product enables course creators to easily integrate the libraries’ quality resources into their course management system. Endeavor will ensure content is available for long lengths of time, reducing the probability of broken links. Libraries will benefit from increased use of their investment in electronic database content and the increased recognition of the role the library plays in the daily education of the student, while institutions benefit from being able to further leverage their investment in course management systems.

Project Muse offers flex-plan
Project Muse, an online collection of scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, has announced its new Flex-Plan Subscription Option for consortia. Starting with 2004 subscriptions, library consortia will be able to design and tailor Muse collections to best meet their needs and budgets. This alternative to the current prepackaged collections offers consortia the ability to customize their journal collections. All libraries within a consortium will have access to the same custom collection. Although the Flex-Plan is designed to offer more flexibility and options, those consortia whose members subscribe to prepackaged collections through the Consortium Volume Discount Plan will receive deeper discounts. Individual libraries will retain the ability to upgrade their subscription to the Muse Full Database collection outside of the consortium arrangement, if desired.

MIT and Rice Univ. join Digital Library Federation
The Digital Library Federation (DLF) has announced that two new strategic partners, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Rice University, have joined the organization. DLF is a relatively small and fast-moving consortium of active academic digital libraries. The addition of the expertise of Rice and MIT is expected to "enrich our understanding of the use of digital library resources in research and teaching, and will accelerate our engagement with institutional repositories, courseware systems, and digital preservation," said DLF director, David Seaman. DLF, founded in 1995, is a partnership organization of academic libraries and related organizations that are pioneering the use of electronic-information technologies.

Ingenta launches library usage statistics
Ingenta, Inc., an active member in Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) has launched its library usage statistic solutions, providing patron usage data from ingeta.com and ingentaselect.com to the 14,500 libraries currently registered on the sites. The services will allow library administrators to further analyze the usage behavior of their patrons online. The new statistics are compliant with the COUNTER code of conduct and are aligned with its goal of ensuring consistent measurement of usage statistic within the online information industry.