What else is there to do on an early Sunday morning but attend an 8 a.m. meeting? Fortunately, this one was an interesting one that did not require vast quantities of coffee to remain engaged. I am hoping the presentation slides, particularly those from Rick Anderson of the University of Utah will be forthcoming.
It was somewhat reassuring to hear others across various institutions grappling with the same issues that our technical services area has been. The good news is some of the ideas others shared we already have incorporated. Other ideas have been mentioned and will likely be in the works in the future. K-State has also been very fortunate that budget cuts have not led to staff layoffs. For example, Rick Anderson shared the University of Utah received a 19% budget reduction and a 20% layoff of technical services staff.
One thing the University of Utah is doing is routing all new orders lacking bibliographic records through OCLC rather than handling original cataloging in-house. This change has allowed them to focus resources on rare and special materials cataloging.
Other things being done by the University of Utah libraries:
- Increasing patron-driven acquisitions. Interlibrary Loan is becoming an acquisitions subgroup where the preferred mode is buy 1st, borrow 2nd. This is a reverse of past practice.
- Purchase on Espesso Book Machine allowing for print on demand of select books
- Purchase on-demand ebooks
- Review logs on the number of keyword searches for known item searches
- Doing more with Dublin Core and CONTENTdm
- Placing more emphasis on retraining.
Following Rick, Gloria Guzi of Cleveland Public Library and Carol Ann Borchert of the University of South Florida spoke regarding how their institutions were shifting resources to the electronic serials. What came through loud and clear in all of the ' presentations was that technical services is in a time of change.
Comments