2001/2002 - University College Cork Library

REPORT OF THE LIBRARY POLICY COMMITTEE 2001/2002
OVERVIEW OF DEVELOPMENTS 2001-2002
Continued annual increases in operating costs, particularly in research journal
subscriptions forced restrictions upon levels of funding to academic departments for
the acquisition of books and journals during 2001/02. However, physical development
plans received a very welcome boost of £22.6M through the PRTLI programme,
including £13.5M from private sources. In addition, the year closed with a
commitment of a significant increase to the Library’s recurrent non-pay funding for
2002/03. Amid these financial vicissitudes, the Library continued to work successfully
towards meeting the aims of its current Strategic Plan of February 2000.
SERVICES
Additional professionally-qualified subject specialist library staff were appointed
during 2000. These included a Part-time Nursing Librarian and an Engineering, IT and
Food Science Librarian. A full-time professional post was re-assigned to the Library
Store. Further extensions to opening hours were introduced, most notably the
extension of evening opening during September 2002.
The newly introduced fee-based External Information Service reported a healthy first
year income.
As in other years the Introductory Library Tours held in early October were a marked
success. This success was repeated in the evening Introductory Library Tours
conducted throughout the month of October and comprehensive user orientation to
non-traditional user groups throughout the first term.
Service levels were maintained throughout the Library (with some pressure on reshelving
from February to May) despite a reduction of library staff costs through a cut
in Student Help staff numbers, and the freezing of some part-time library assistant
posts.
Significantly, UCC ranked as the most intensive user of the two major national
electronic information services: the ISI Web of Science citation database and the
Elsevier Science Direct collection of 1,300 electronic journals. This was boosted by
the introduction of a system allowing remote access by UCC Library users to UCC’s
library databases.
COLLECTIONS
The Library continued to allocate approximately 90% of its budget to the acquisition of
electronic and print materials. A feature of the period was the acquisition of a growing
volume of journal and reference material in electronic form. Unfortunately, the
potential savings afforded by electronic production and distribution have not been
passed by publishers to consumers. As a result, electronic versions continue to cost as
much as, and in some cases more than their print impressions. For the second time,
the CHIU Libraries formed a consortium and tendered as a unit for the supply of
research journals over the next 3 years.
The decision of the Faculty of Arts to jointly fund a major cataloguing project covering
all of the Library’s 61,000 Special Collections, offers the prospect of online access to
the records of these hitherto unrecorded collections.
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