The Librarian's Courtyard, Sterling Memorial Library.

Even amid this ferment of change, the character of much of the library's work alters but little over any one- or even five-year period. The very stability of its support activities is an indicator of the library's strength.

A research library brings material together for convenient use. That convenience has long been predicated on the ownership of research collections, and scores of subject-specialist librarians selected new material last year that enhanced the utility of the collections for teaching and research. They acquired current scholarly writings very broadly as well as an immense range of primary material--from statistical reports to belles lettres. The print part of our collections grew by about 580 volumes every working day of the year. This long-sustained level of collecting is matched by few other libraries anywhere in the world.

Yale's distinguished special collections continued to be a major source of strength. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library maintained one of the nation's most vigorous collection-building programs in literature, history, and the arts--all very broadly conceived. Other special collections in the history of medicine, in the history of Christian missions, and in law, diplomacy, public life, and bioethics also flourished.

The library's collecting activity reflects the rapid and fundamental changes taking place in many parts of the world. The library maintains a network of dealers and agents throughout the world and undergirds these arrangements by periodic visits by library staff to areas particularly subject to change and important to the university's academic programs. Last year, library staff traveled to South Africa, China, Ukraine, Russia, and the Czech Republic.

A collection of 10 million volumes in a library with approximately 60 service points and a burgeoning world of electronic resources poses many choices and much complexity to anyone wishing to make fully effective use of them.

Last year, the library strengthened its instructional programs to help readers deal successfully with these challenges. Collaboration between faculty and library staff in providing classroom instruction on library resources pertinent to specific topics increased. Particularly strong programs of classroom and workshop instruction are developing in the Science, Divinity, Medicine, Art and Architecture, and the Social Sciences libraries and in the Reference and Manuscripts and Archives departments of Sterling. Senior thesis writers and freshpersons enrolled in intensive-writing classes particularly benefited from this instruction. The library recorded 435 formal instructional sessions last year.

The library occupies more than 690,000 net square feet of space in seventeen buildings. We handle some 132 tons of mail every year. System-wide, we charged out 640,643 items; and for every book readers check out, they also use another one within the library. We reshelved perhaps 4,000 books every day last year. By these measures and many others, the library continues to be a heavily-used work space for faculty and students.

Library service units vary widely in scope of operation and reflect the rich variety of academic programs at Yale. The smallest of these units, the Numismatic Collection, is open only 10 hours a week, while the Cross Campus Library accounts for nearly one quarter of the library's circulation activity and is open 17.5 hours a day on weekdays during the term. We recorded 358,164 questions and requests for reference assistance at these service units.

The library is also home to long-standing editorial projects concerning James Boswell, Benjamin Franklin, and British Parliamentary papers. It is home as well to oral history projects in American music and among Holocaust survivors. We operate visiting scholars programs at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington and at the Beinecke Library. The Beinecke program was expanded last year to include summer fellowships for Yale graduate students. The Medical Library continued its central role in developing integrated research and patient-care information through a medical-center wide project funded by the National Library of Medicine. All of these activities and many others make the university library a vibrant center for scholarship.

The library's collection includes millions of bound volumes, microforms, maps, manuscripts, and archival materials. Last year, the collections grew by 149,417 volumes (net) and 1,355 linear feet of manuscript and archival material. Readers properly expect to have timely, accurate, individual descriptions and location information for all of these resources. To meet this expectation, the library employs a staff of acquisition librarians, catalogers, and archivists, as well as staff who maintain the automated system that supports all of these (and other) activities. Catalogers stayed current with new additions to the collections and were able to reduce processing backlogs in many units.

To ensure the continued utility of Yale's world-class research collections, the library maintains one of the oldest, largest, and most comprehensive preservation programs in North America. The program has been restructured to give new attention to the circulating collections, to involve the library's selectors, bibliographers, and curators more closely in decision making, and to reduce processing backlogs and increase productivity in all activities.

The library has long been active in reformatting brittle books to microfilm. Last year, the Preservation Department completed two projects--in the social sciences and Western Americana--funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The department also received a new $1.5 million grant from NEH to provide comprehensive preservation services for the library's outstanding British history collection.

The NEH-funded portion of Project Open Book was brought to completion last year. This research and development program, involving the Xerox Corporation, allowed us to experiment with converting reels of microfilm to digital files. The project created a database of 2,000 books relating to the U.S. Civil War, the history of Spain, and the history of communism, fascism, and socialism. Through Project Open Book, Yale is leading the nation's research libraries in understanding the costs, technical means, and challenges of large-scale digital conversion.

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Last Revision: January 9, 2003