Simon Fraser University Library ANNUAL REPORT Fiscal Year 1997/98

• The Library Management Group prepared for the Library's external review by conducting a self-study. Opinion about library services was obtained from the University community via two surveys conducted in the 1997 Fall semester. The self-study focused on three topics: Library accomplishments since the 1991 Library review, current concerns, and future directions. The Library's External Review Committee visited the SFU Burnaby and Downtown campuses in March 1998. The External Review Committee's report was not released until June 1998. It is expected that Library managers and staff will focus much of their effort during 1998/99 in responding to the External Review Committee's report and recommendations, as well as producing a three year plan for the Library.

• The University’s allocation to the Library materials budget for FY 1997/98 was insufficient to entirely compensate for the continuing price inflation and currency devaluation. Consequently the Library cancelled $100,000 in journal subscriptions and reduced its previous year’s target of monographs acquisitions by $20,000. These reductions were made after all academic departments reviewed their journals and ranked them from the most critical to the least critical. The Senate Library Committee determined a formula for allocating the target reductions assigned to various library and academic department accounts in a fair and equitable manner.

• The Library Endowment Funds reached $2,000,000 despite the elimination of matching grants from the BC government.

• The Library’s gifts program brought in gifts valued at $490,600. The largest gift was from MPR Teltech which came to the Library through an initial contact in the Engineering Sciences Faculty. Dispersion of the MPR Teltech gift was shared with the University of Victoria Library. Other significant gifts came from two retiring SFU faculty members. There were over 100 library gift donors during the year.

• The Loans Division initiated a self-serve cassette tape duplicating service for course lecture tapes. This has reduced the number of original tapes which go missing by about 60 %, and enables students to have their own personal copy of a taped lecture.

• The Loans Desk began to offer a money change service for students and faculty. It is not unusual for Loans staff to dispense between $500 and $1,000 per day in change. At the same time, the Loans Desk began to offer refunds for photocopying Copicards.

• The number of book loan renewals for three week books was increased from one to two at the beginning of the Spring semester.

• A web interface was developed for searching the Library’s BRS databases. It is named SLRI (SFU Library Research Instrument) and is a significant rewriting of software developed at Stanford University.

• Web based document requesting software, named GODOT (Generalized Online Document Ordering and Texts), was developed and integrated with SLRI. When SLRI displays the citation of a desired document, GODOT tells which BC and western Canadian university libraries have the document; it can then be requested for delivery using GODOT. The ease of using the GODOT software to order documents has significantly increased the number of requests processed by Interlibrary Loans. The GODOT software was developed by SFU Library on contract with the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries.

• The availability of online full text via the SFU Library Kiosk has grown rapidly, especially for science journals and government documents. A large collection of online full text journals will be added in the fall as part of a BC Electronic Library Network consortium purchase.

• Work was begun on an online Library course for accessing business information. A prototype will be demonstrated at SFU’s 2^nd Annual Symposium on Innovative Teaching and Educational Technology Exhibition in October.

• A number of projects were undertaken to improve information in the Library's online catalogue: Statistics Canada documents were entered into the catalogue together with the appropriate Internet linkages, the display of journal holdings information was improved, and additional work was done to integrate the old government documents collection into the LC classed collection.

• Library services were promoted in the University community with presentations at the 1^st Annual Symposium on Innovative Teaching and Educational Technology Exhibition; at a joint seminar with staff from the Lohn Learning Centre; and at an SFU Administrators meeting. Presentations were also made to a number of departments. The faculty newsletter about Library services continues to be distributed during the fall and spring semesters.

• Faculty consultations with liaison librarians increased 35 % over the previous year.

• 4,000 SFU students received library research instruction tailored to specific course assignments. This was a 40 % increase over the previous year.

• Library Kiosk web pages were linked to University course web pages to assist students in completing their assignments.

• The RDL assumed responsibility for providing access to and management of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) databases. A number of geocoded databases and files were mounted during the year. RDL has held workshops on using GIS.

• The 1996 census files were mounted on the RDL web pages.

• Access to the International Monetary Fund databases was negotiated for SFU through the University of Toronto’s CHASS (Computing for Humanities and Social Sciences Facility). CHASS also continues to provide SFU faculty and students web format access to CANSIM and CITIBASE databases.

• Use of the Belzberg Library has stabilized over the last few years with a total annual head count usage of 170,00 and a total of 42,000 information queries.

• Library use instruction was integrated into the general orientation sessions for new students in the Executive MBA, Gerontology, Liberal Studies, master of Publishing, and the Integrated Studies Program as well as a number of non-credit programs.

• Nine new public computers were installed to improve access to the web.

• The library entrance doors were upgraded with an automatic opening mechanism for disabled users.

• A major shelf inventory project was undertaken to retain only actively used books at Belzberg Library. Books not retained at Belzberg were returned to W.A.C. Bennett Library.

2. Starting December 1996, students at the Bennett Library were made eligible to use the OJAC requesting service. These numbers are included under Photocopies in the "Items Borrowed from Other Libraries".