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HILTON C. BULEY LIBRARY
COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT REPORT
FY'2008, AY' 2007-2008
July 28, 2008

Narrative Discussion

A. Circulating Print Collections Overview - Nancy Bobrek

1. Discipline-specific Allocations
2. Special Allocations
3. Reference Collection
4. Special Collections
5. Awards Program for Children's and Juvenile Books
6. Librarian-Selector Changes

B. Electronic Resources

1. Electronic Databases - Sue Clerc
2. eBooks - Nancy Bobrek
3. eJournals - Ed Hoyer

C. Media Collection (Hing Wu) and Microfilm Fund (Ed Hoyer)

D. Fall Library Liaison Meeting

E. Graduate Program Reviews

• Marriage and Family Therapy Department
• Sociology Department
• Science and Environmental Education Department
  

F. Special Projects - Artists' Book Collection - (Tina Re)

G. Acquisitions and Cataloging Support Staff
for the Technical Services Division

Appendix A: List of Librarian-Selectors
for Academic Departments

NARRATIVE DISCUSSION

•  BULEY LIBRARY MATERIALS BUDGET

The Buley Library total materials budget for FY08 was $2,204,510. This amount represented an increase of 3% from the FY'07 budget amount of $2,132,100. During FY'08, the following amounts were allocated to the four principal accounts that support our acquisitions and collection development activity: print books, print journals, electronic resources and other library materials. The electronic resources category is divided into three smaller categories: electronic resources, eBooks, and eJournals, while the Other Library Materials category is divided between Media purchases in a variety of categories and Microforms.

A. CIRCULATING COLLECTION – Overview

During FY'08 , $522,000 was allocated for the purchase of new book titles to be added to the Buley Library's circulating and reference book collections. This amounted to 24% of the library's total materials budget. Of this total amount, $330,000 or 64% of the book budget was designated for the purchase of books to be added to the general circulating collection, or one of the more specialized collections listed below. In total, 5,749 books were added to the stacks in the general circulating collection, with the remainder added to special collections or self-contained locations within the library, such as the Connecticut Room, the Faculty Authors Collection, the Curriculum Lab, the Learning Resource Center, and the Rare Book Room. The remaining 36% of the book budget, or $189,900 was designated for the purchase of new titles to be added to the non-circulating Reference Collection, which amounted to 787 titles during FY'08.

In addition to purchased items, 57 Masters Theses, 23 Honors Theses, and 6 Ed.D. Dissertations were donated to the collections by individual teaching departments, while 106 Government documents were received through the library's participation in the federal depository library program. Lastly, gift book items from many sources are reviewed by the individual selectors for the disciplines each year, which resulted in 605 additional titles being added to the collection during FY'08. In total 14, 340 items were added to the collection in all formats during FY'08.

1. Discipline-Specific Allocations - Funds for the circulating book collection are allocated each year to the specific subject selectors for the assigned disciplines, based on a pre-determined formula. During FY'08, 55% of the allocated funds for books were designated for the use of the librarian-selectors who support specific academic departments. These discipline-specific allocations were as follows:

*These percentages do not include reference books which are not allocated by discipline

In terms of discipline specific allocations, all book funds with an allocation over $4,000 were reduced during FY'08, to support greater allocations in the area of electronic resources, which encompasses eBooks, ejournals, and electronic databases. Book funds that ranged between $4,000 and $7,999 were cut by 10%, funds ranging from $8,000 to $12,999 were cut by 15%, and funds over $13,000 were cut by 20%. These fund reductions, coupled with the erosion of our purchasing power, resulted in considerably fewer print books being purchased for the collections in FY'08.

2 . Special Allocations - In addition to funds that are designated for academic
departments, within the various schools of the university, the remaining 45% of the library's book budget during FY'08 was designated for Special Allocations, in the amounts listed below.

Collection Development Fund and the Director Fund - Both the Collection Development Fund and the Director fund, which are administered by the Collection Development Librarian and the Library Director respectively, are discretionary funds used to acquire titles in all disciplines. In addition, the Collection Development Fund includes a small allocation for the replacement of missing or damaged titles.

During FY'08, the Director's Fund was further subdivided into the Director's Fund for the Connecticut Room Collection, administered by the Special Collections Librarian, and the Director's Fund for New Faculty Members. The Director's Fund for New Faculty Members supports requests from those faculty members who are in their first year of teaching at Southern, and is designed to administer to the unique instructional and research interests of these individuals. During FY'08, new faculty members selected 22 new titles on such subjects as forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology, family, delinquency and crime, and documentary filmmaking, among others.

In addition, a small portion of the Collection Development Fund continues to be allocated each year to support the development of the Artist's Book Collection, which is being administered by Tina Re, librarian selector for the Arts. A brief update on the Artist's Book Collection, written by Tina, appears in the final section of this report.

3. Reference Collection – During FY'08, “firm orders” for Reference Book titles that are made on a one-time basis, amounted to 223 titles, or 35% of the Reference budget, while the allocation for Reference Continuations was 65% of the Reference budget. This allocation split between Firm Reference Book orders and Reference Book Continuations is now working effectively for us. In the area of firm Reference Book orders, the subject areas of English, History, and Political Science predominated.

The Reference Collection allocation also supports the continued receipt of some 480 reference items, spanning all disciplines, which are issued regularly as new editions, or series continuations, and are received on a “standing order” basis through YBP Library Services. These items are supplied on a year-round basis, and include individual titles that appear as part of a series, as well as regularly scheduled new editions of existing titles. Currently there are approximately 20 titles that are published as series. These include titles dealing with current issues (Annual Editions, At Issue, Contemporary World Issues, Information Plus, Opposing Viewpoints, and Taking Sides ) ; publications on countries (Area Handbooks, Global Studies, World Today); Literature (Contemporary Authors Series, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Literary Criticism, Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism, Something About the Author, Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, Children's Literature Review), Librarians examine the standing order list for cancellations/additions each year, and this list is monitored and modified in each subsequent fiscal year.

Several business and legal publishers also supply titles to the library on a continuations basis, amounting to nearly $40,000 per year. In the business category these suppliers are Dun & Bradstreet, Standard & Poors, and Mergent, while the Thomson-West Company supplies specialized titles in the legal category.

4. Special Collections – The Special Collections at Buley Library are managed by Dr. Paul Holmer, who has continued to concentrate on developing the library's signature collection of Historic Textbooks, which was heavily damaged during the Buley Library flood. Acquisitions of 18 th Century examples were made during FY'08 for this collection, and progress was also made towards restoring the Eula Davies Collection of Napoleonica. Work has also continued to build the illustrated Carter and Illustrated Ephemera Collections, as well as the Faculty Author's Collection and the Westville/West Rock Collection. In the area of gift donations to the Special Collections, an additional 160 juvenile titles were given to the library by Helen Liveten, and the Department of Information and Library Science at SCSU contributed 12 boxes of MLS research papers and eight boxes of new material. Dr. Holmer has prepared a separate, more detailed report regarding activity within the Special Collections area.

5. Children's and Juvenile Book Awards Program - Lastly, a portion of the special allocation for the Curriculum Lab/Juvenile Collection is used to support the Children's Book Awards Program, which consists of standing orders for 31 different book awards in the Children's and Young Adult Literature categories. Last year, this amounted to almost 600 fiction and non-fiction titles. The three largest awards, which are: Notable Children's Trade Books in the Field of Social Studies, ALA Best Books for Young Adults, and ALA Notable Books for Children, account for nearly a third of all the titles received. Collectively, the titles purchased through this standing order program represent the best resources currently being published in the category of Children's and Young Adult Literature. The Children's Book Awards Book Program is supplemented by individual selections made by Ali Zamouri, Librarian-Selector for the Curriculum Lab/Juvenile Collection. Other librarians who select resources in this area are June Cheng, Librarian-Selector for the School of Education , and Winnie Shyam, Librarian-Selector for the English Department.

6. Librarian-Selector Changes - During FY'08, selecting responsibilities remained largely unchanged for the first portion of the fiscal year. However, in January of 2008, Susan Miller, Library Instruction Coordinator, resigned from the professional library staff, and Nancy Bobrek, Collection Development Librarian, assumed the selecting responsibilities for the discipline of Journalism. Other members of the Library Faculty assumed responsibility for completing the selections for the Information and Library Science area. A complete listing of the selecting responsibilities of the departmental librarian liaisons appears in Appendix A of this report, along with the number of titles selected with their departmental allocations.

B. ELECTRONIC RESOURCES 

The electronic resources budget accounts for the largest category of spending within the Buley Library, accounting for 63% of the library's total materials budget of $2,204,510. The category of electronic resources consists of allocations for electronic databases, eBooks, and ejournals, which amounted to a total of $1,395,000 during FY'08. These allocations were as follows:

Electronic Databases - Dr. Sue Clerc, who has written a separate report concerning this category, handles the admistration of the Electronic databases allocation. A substantial portion of the allocation for Electronic Databases each year is spent on the maintenance of existing database contracts, which now amounts to some 78 individual products. In addition, the Buley Library contributes to the purchase of a select number of database products that are purchased in conjunction with the other libraries in the CSU consortium. This arrangement saves the library a substantial amount of money each year, and allows us to offer products to our academic community that would not otherwise be affordable. Lastly, a certain number of the database products that appear on the Buley Library home page are made freely accessible to us through the iCONN digital library, or are made freely accessible on the open web.

The allocation for Electronic Databases allows us to purchase 3-5 new electronic database offerings each year, in a variety of subject areas, or to upgrade existing products. During FY'08, the Buley Library Collection Development Committee and the Director of the Buley Library authorized the acquisition of the following new electronic database products: Book Index with Reviews, Environment Complete, Film & Television Literature Index, JSTOR Arts and Science V, and the Small Business Resource Center . In addition, the BioOne database was upgraded with the addition of BioOne, Version. 2.

EBooks – the purchase of eBooks remains a relatively new category of spending for the Buley Library, and the Collection Development Committee continues to maintain a conservative approach to buying in this category, with only 5% of the allocated budget for electronic resources targeted to eBooks. For purchasing purposes, we define an eBook as a digitized version of the print book, with no new content added. Based on this definition, a number of products, which had previously been funded through the electronic databases account, were transferred to the eBooks account for the FY'08 fiscal year. An annual allocation of $48,960 was required during FY'08 to support these 14 existing eBook products, which consist largelyof eBook products in the Reference Book category. They include the Credo Reference product, the Gale Ready-Reference Shelf, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Oxford English Dictionary . Discipline-specific ebook products include the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , the Grove Dictionary of Art , the Mergent Manuals digitized (business), and the Mental Measurements Yearbook.

Our FY'08 allocation allowed for the purchase of two additional ebook product packages, 14 individual Reference Book titles that were acquired from the Gale Virtual Reference Library, and one product upgrade, which involved adding Tests in Print to the Mental Measurements Yearbook. In the category of new eBook packages, the library added two exciting new products, the Nursing Reference Center and the Safari Tech Online Books package. The Nursing Resource Center, offered by the EBSCO company, provides information on diseases and conditions, through the provision of Quick Lesson Overviews and Evidence-based Care Sheets; drug information, compiled from F.A. Davis's Drug Guide for Nurses ; and patient education through the compilation of information drawn from the CINAHL Nursing Guide, Practice Guidelines, and featured books.

The Safari Tech Online Books product allows us to significantly expand our offering of books that support the productivity and scientific software that is used in the university, to upgrade our offerings in the discipline of Computer Science for classroom instruction, and also to supplement our selection of electronic business books. In the technical area, this includes coverage of such specific subjects as HTML, Web programming, Web editors, the Microsoft Office Suite, Photoshop, Operating Systems, and the Java and Visual Basic Programming languages. In the business category, titles dealing with various facets of management, management information systems, human resources, business communication, conflict resolution, economics and accounting have been selected.

Ejournals – the ejournals category, administered by Ed Hoyer, Serials Cataloger, received an allocation of $885,290 during FY'08. In addition to titles that are supplied by our serials vendor, the EBSCO Company, in print, electronic, or bundled formats, the Buley Library maintains subscriptions to some 13 individual ejournal packages, from such organizations as the American Chemical Society, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Mathematical Society, among others. Subscriptions to these individual ejournal packages accounted for 37% of the expenditures for ejournals during FY'08, or approximately $325,304.37.

During the fall of 2007, a major Serials Overlap Analysis Study was conducted by our Systems Librarian at the time, Mr. Tim Klassen, working with Ed Hoyer and members of the Buley Library Collection Development Committee. This study was conducted to identify journal titles being received in print format, that were also available electronically in full-text format in two or more bibliographic databases. The results of this study identified 569 titles in print for possible cancellation, and an estimated savings approaching $93,000. The savings actually realized by this study, however, were somewhat less. This was due to the fact that price increases for FY'08 were not initially calculated into these savings, coupled with administrative fees levied by the EBSCO Company. Also, some teaching departments requested retention of selected journals in print format, for a variety of reasons. However, from a strategic and fiscal standpoint, this study moved the Buley Library significantly ahead in its transition from the hybrid model of maintaining print and electronic versions of journal titles, to our goal of a journal collection where electronic is the predominate format. This is particularly desirable, because many of the potential economies of online journals are not achieved if dual formats are sustained.

C. MEDIA AND MICROFILM FUND (Other Library Materials)

The purchase of non-print items continues to be accomplished through the Media Fund, which was funded with $50,000 during FY'08, with allocations of $21,500 for instructional media, $25,000 for the development of the World Films Collection, and $3,500 to develop the CD ROM collection, which consists primarily of musical CDs. The Media fund is administered separately by Hing Wu, Acquisitions/Media Cataloger in the Technical Services Department, who works closely with the professional staff of the Learning Resources Center , the subject specific librarian selectors and members of the teaching faculty to acquire resources in DVD and other multi-media formats. A separate report, detailing Collection Development activity in the Media area, has been written by Hing Wu.

The other library materials fund also supports the acquisition of resources in microfilm or microfiche format, and is administered by Ed Hoyer, Serials Cataloger in the Technical Services Department. The category of microforms is one of rapidly decreasing importance in the allocations of the Buley Library materials budget, and only accounted for 1% of the library's allocated budget for serials during FY'08. This is largely due to displacement from serial resources that are now offered in a variety of digital formats, which is the format of choice. While a number of items on microfiche and microfilm were cancelled during FY'08, the library continues to maintain a select number of retrospective periodical and newspaper holdings, in microform format.

D. LIBRARY LIAISON FALL MEETING

The Library Liaison Fall Luncheon Meeting, which was held on November 5, 2007, afforded members of the Library Faculty an opportunity to share information concerning new resources and services with the Departmental Library Liaisons, representing the various academic disciplines, as well as to formally meet the new Library Director, Dr. Christina Baum. Dr. Baum opened the meeting with some brief introductory comments. The agenda for the meeting was as follows:

•  Demonstration of New Collections Page in Development for the Buley Library
Nancy Bobrek, Collection Development Librarian

•  Project Submerged: A Flood Update & Photographic Overview
Shirley Cavanagh, Access Services Division Head, Cindy Schofield-Bodt,
Technical Services Division Head

  •  Annual Review of Collection Development Activities – AY'06-07
Nancy Bobrek, Acquisitions/Collection Development Librarian, Dr. Sue Clerc, Electronic Resources Coordinator .

.

E. GRADUATE PROGRAM REVIEWS

During the past year, the Buley Library has continued to participate very effectively in the Graduate Program Review process, providing various levels of support to the reviews for the Marriage and Family Therapy, Sociology, and Science and Environmental Education Programs. Library reports written for these reviews reflect the substantial contributions made by the librarian-selectors for these disciplines, in terms of coordinating the book and media selection process in support of the academic programs offered at Southern. Selectors whose departments were on the Graduate Program Review calendar for AY'07-08 included Lisa Bier, Librarian-Selector for the Marriage and Family Therapy Program as well as the Sociology Department, and Rebecca Hedreen, Librarian-Selector for the Science and Environmental Education Program.

Our library reports for the Graduate Program Reviews, which are quite comprehensive, follow the format below, which has been developed by Collection Development Librarian, Nancy Bobrek.

•  Introduction to the library's resources and identification of selectors
•  Breakdown of resources by Library of Congress classes for the discipline.
•  Collection counts by Library of Congress class
•  Budgeted five-year allocation for the discipline and number of items selected.
•  Narrative discussion of resources within each major Library of Congress class profiled for the discipline.
•  List of electronic databases specific to the discipline

F. SPECIAL PROJECTS INITIATIVES

  1. Artists' Book Collection (written by Tina Re) – The Artists' Book Collection is currently in its' third year of development, and FY'08 has been an eventful year for the development and promotion of this unique resource on campus. During this year, 17 titles have been purchased with the $3200 allocation. Highlights include Destination Moon , a flag book by Karen Hanmer, which juxtaposes archival photographs and documents pertaining to the Apollo Space program with text of John F. Kennedy's “Man on the Moon by the End of the Decade” speech and a whimsical song about a couple's trip to the moon. Also added to the collection are three books by the Scripps College Press, Unbuttoned, Cut and Dried , and This Tends to Happen , a hand-sewn double accordion-fold binding created by students at Scripps. A very successful and well-attended Open House was held in the Connecticut Room on March 30 in order to display the collection and to provide a forum for discussion and interaction with the books. A brief overview of the collection, as well as a selective annotated bibliography of titles, was provided to all attendees.

Future plans call for additional related library and campus wide book arts activities, which will be planned and coordinated by Tina Re. The library hopes to continue to develop this unique teaching resource, consisting of unique and edition books, and representing a range of modern and contemporary artists' books, fine press books, and book works.

Submitted by Nancy Bobrek,
Collection Development Librarian, 8/08

G. ACQUISITIONS AND CATALOGING SUPPORT STAFF

The Collection Development function is extremely dependent upon the provision of efficient and accurate work in the Acquisitions and Cataloging support functions of the Technical Services Department, which is managed by Cindy Schofield-Bodt, Technical Services Division Head. This work begins with the pre-searching of an individual resource request to find pricing information and ISBN numbers, if not provided, and requires diligent follow-through on all of the steps that end with the resource being made shelf ready. In the case of physical items, this means that the item has been received and stamped, paid for, cataloged and labeled, and security taped to guard against theft. To expedite this complex process, support personnel in the Technical Services function use the sophisticated functions of an integrated library system to place and receive orders electronically, update the status of orders, pay invoices, justify expenditures, perform copy cataloging, and communicate information regarding titles received to the individual librarian-selectors for the disciplines. Much of this work can be characterized as labor-intensive and requires meticulous attention to detail.

All of the librarians engaged in the Collection Development process, gratefully acknowledge the efforts of our dedicated library support staff in the Acquisitions and Cataloging support functions. These individuals are:

Arlene Balkauskas – Office Assistant
Tom Celentano – Library Technician
Lori Cohen – Messenger and Supply Clerk
Mary Migliaro – Library Technician
Karen Shea – Clerk
Marilyn Terlaga – Office Assistant
Peggy Weiler –Library Technical Assistant
Kim Wilk –Library Technical Assistant

APPENDIX A: Librarian-Selectors By Department, AY'07-08