Terminals to access the online catalog, Orbis, in the nave of Sterling Memorial Library

Paradoxically, the library is one of the most stable and yet one of the fastest-changing organizations of the university. In recent years, the pace of library change has been set by the rapid adoption of personal computing technology by students and faculty. This part of my report describes how the library supports the transformation of the substance and manner of much academic work that is now taking place. The faculty Advisory Committee on Library Policy plays a key role in helping the library shape its responses to such fundamental change.

Assembling research material for convenient use takes on new meaning in an environment permeated by information created and delivered electronically. Readers now expect to survey and retrieve large quantities of information at their desktop computers at any time. There is a superabundance of electronic information readily available. Last year, library staff moved aggressively to select and organize some of the most valuable of these resources for ready use in library-based World Wide Web home pages. These are found under the library's home page (http://www.library.yale.edu/yulhome.html). The breadth of the resources available and the utility and ease of using these home pages are exemplified in the home pages for the United Nations Scholars' Workstation, for the Divinity and Medical libraries, and for resources supporting International Studies at Yale.

Much information available on the World Wide Web and most digital government information is freely available. Much additional information in electronic form is available for sale. The library provides a great deal of commercially available information on-line and on CD-ROM. A small number of on-line science journals were made available to readers last year for the first time. These information resources employ a wide variety of software, much of it proprietary, and they often require specially configured hardware. Commercial products involve many different licensing agreements and pose a host of complex, and costly, networking challenges. Investments in databases and the means of access to them are often substantial and subject to quick obsolescence. In such a volatile market, Yale library staff must move with considerable technical and intellectual agility to identify how best to bring those resources to readers.

To meet the instructional needs created by information technology, the library built an electronic classroom last year in the Cross Campus Library. It has 17 networked desktop computers and projection equipment. It is heavily used for library-based instruction, but anyone needing such a classroom may schedule sessions there. The Medical Library also created a well-equipped Training and Consultation Center to support its varied programs of instruction.

Much of last year's World Wide Web home-page development was inspired by the need to deliver instruction at the time and place such guidance is most directly needed and meaningful to the reader.

Responding to needs identified by the Provost's Advisory Committee on Information Technology, the library and Computing and Information Services laid the groundwork for a program of assistance to individual faculty wishing to use information technology in discipline-specific ways for teaching, research, and administration. This program will be launched in FY1996.

We were particularly pleased to extend Cross Campus Library hours to 2:00 am last year, in response to student needs. And to improve service to a large campus broadly engaged with multi-disciplinary study, the library instituted Eli Express last year. This popular service allows readers to request and return material, wherever it may be permanently shelved, at the library unit most convenient to them. Further initiatives in interlibrary loan and document delivery services will attempt to lower the very high cost of these activities and make them much more convenient for readers.

The library's on-line catalog and citation files receive a new inquiry, on average, once every ten seconds, night and day, every day of the year. To support this level of use, the library continued to build a strong technical infrastructure by replacing functionally obsolete terminals with much more agile, networked PCs. This change measurably increased staff productivity while it directly benefited readers as well. PCs that offer much expanded access to networked information resources and much easier navigation among those resources were placed in several libraries. Further significant enhancements for readers are scheduled for FY1996. Principal among them will be enhancements to the Medical Library's Netmenu and a new graphical interface for Orbis that builds on PC capabilities, the World Wide Web, and standards for interoperability among systems that handle bibliographic data.

Last year's single most important enhancement of the library's infrastructure was the near completion of our plans for the retrospective conversion of some 4.5 million card-catalog cards to machine-readable form. In a bibliographic environment moving rapidly to a digital base, readers are severely handicapped when more than 60% of Yale's collection is not represented in Orbis, the library's on-line catalog. Conversion projects completed or underway last year for the Cross Campus Library and the Beinecke guided our planning for the comprehensive, multi-year, multi-million dollar conversion task the library will formally begin in FY1996. Integral to this project are measures to eliminate the backlog of uncataloged material and to provide early reader access to newly acquired material.

Faculty sometimes ask about the disposition of the card catalog, when the conversion of its records to machine-readable form is complete. Whatever decision may eventually be made, it cannot be made for another decade. The next several years' experience with an increasingly complete, accurate, and reliable on-line catalog will guide thinking about the card catalog. Any thinking about the disposition of the card catalog now would necessarily be uninformed and highly speculative.

Last year was a landmark in space planning for the library. To meet the long-standing need of Yale's music community for adequate library space, the preliminary design for an $11 million new Music Library was completed. The facility will be built in Sterling's northwest light court, originally intended as the site for a now prohibitively-expensive second book-stack tower. About half of the space needed for the Music Library will be newly built; the remainder will be renovated Sterling space.

In addition, after more than five years of architectural and engineering design work, a $35 million project is now underway to rehabilitate the 16-floor Sterling book-stacks building and install effective environmental controls for the space where some 40% of the library's collections are shelved. When the project is completed in 1997, the long-term chemical deterioration of Sterling's collections will all but halt. The book-stacks project also includes the renovation of a few reader spaces, including the Main Reading Room.

Space shortages have long been critical at the Art and Architecture Library, which now houses more than four times the number of volumes it was originally designed to hold. Planning for a new Arts Library (to remain in the Art and Architecture Building) was an integral part of the work done last year by the Provost's Arts Area Planning Committee.

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