“How Far Have We Come?”--Letter from the Dean of Libraries
January 2009—Each new year brings an opportunity to reflect on events of the past year, reevaluate our priorities, and renew our goals and objectives. In my last letter I asked the question "How do we serve?" and discussed the many ways in which the library, its faculty and staff, can be of service to the community and the university as a whole. The question I find myself asking now, one year into our strategic plan, "Envisioning the Future: the Next Seven Years 2007-2013," is "How far have we come?" What have we accomplished over the past months that will help us serve you better, and better address the core values and mission of Marquette University?
The truth is that we have come a long way. Using the strategic plan as our road map, we have made many changes to our services and resources this past year, all in the interest of providing you with the best possible care here at Marquette University Libraries.
One of the most exciting developments to come from our work this year is the creation of an institutional digital repository, e-publications@Marquette, where faculty and students can deposit their published and unpublished scholarship and make it openly accessible to the Marquette community and the world. Faculty research and scholarship, and the new knowledge and connections that they engender, are at the heart of every university’s mission. Marquette’s University Libraries have always been a central partner in aiding and abetting faculty research, and that is truer now than ever as libraries not only provide the books, journals and documents necessary for research and scholarly communication, but also help to disseminate faculty research and raise the profile of Marquette faculty and students. The advantages for students and faculty are enormous—scholarship becomes discoverable via popular search engines such as Google and Google Scholar, and researchers who previously had limited or no access to these materials can now use and cite them. Faculty and students interested in contributing to the institutional repository, and those who have questions and thoughts, are encouraged to contact Ann Hanlon, Digital Projects Librarian.
In the past year Raynor Memorial Libraries has also sought to increase awareness of scholarly communication, co-sponsoring the Fifth Annual Research Institute with the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs. Five nationally recognized speakers came and shared their thoughts on various aspects of scholarly communication with faculty members and interested graduate students. In order to make information about scholarly communication more accessible to the campus community, the Libraries’ newly formed Scholarly Communication Working Group has created a Web site to educate Marquette faculty and graduate students on the changing nature of scholarly communication as it has been affected by rising journal subscription costs and the ability to share research electronically. Information on the “open access” movement, retaining author’s rights, and the NIH Public Access Policy are also available. The group also sponsored an educational session aimed at preparing our librarians to work with the University on these issues and is planning a series of faculty-focused lectures as well.
We’ve embraced new technologies and tools in order to interact with our users and to increase our presence in the increasingly important online sphere. The department of Special Collections and Archives has created a Flickr stream of selected images from archival photo collections; Research and Instructional Services has created a new collection of Research Guides and is migrating the former “Research Starting Points” to the new template; and the online catalog, MARQCAT, has been enhanced, among other things, to reflect the relevance of word search results.
In response to the changing needs of our library’s users and the emerging discipline of electronic and online learning, we’ve created three new librarian positions within our existing staff. Alberto Herrera, Jr., serves as our new Diversity Services librarian, helping us to address the concerns and requirements of our large campus community. Julie O’Keeffe is working closely with the Center for Teaching and Learning as our E-Learning librarian, helping us to integrate new technologies and learning tools within our existing resources. And Ann Hanlon, our new Digital Projects librarian, is helping to create and maintain our digital collections in her work with the Institutional Repository and her collaboration with Special Collections and University Archives.
But our work is not yet done. We have much more to accomplish in the upcoming year, and we’re going to need to work together in order to meet our goals. In consideration of new technologies and search tools, we need to reassess the limits and unrealized potential of our online catalog as it is used by our community. The members of our Public Interface Committee, in cooperation with the Office of Marketing and Communication, are conducting a comprehensive study of our Web site’s usage statistics, survey data, and model site criteria in order to develop a new design for the library Web site. They are seeking to increase user accessibility and functionality while streamlining the Web site’s existing structure. The Resource Discovery Committee is working hard to uncover new services and ways we can offer information to you, including a potential redesign of the library catalog, enabling mobile access to the catalog, and more.
We’ve come a long way, and we have exciting plans for the coming year.
Janice S. Welburn
Dean, University Libraries
