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E Pluribus Unum: One Library
Paul Kobulnicky
Director, University Libraries
The histories and curricula of the University's regional campuses are individualistic, responding to local needs or unique opportunities. Waterbury and Torrington offer lower division undergraduate courses only, while Avery Point and Hartford host major graduate programs in marine sciences and social work respectively. Unlike any of the others, Stamford offers a four year undergraduate degree.
Similarly, the libraries at the regional campuses reflect this history of individual development. Each is, officially, a department within the University Libraries, but there have been few organizing principles system-wide, uneven support over the years, and a wide variety of policy and procedure from campus to campus. Each library has gone its own way, even to the extent of automating with different, and largely incompatible, systems. We have been a loose federation of libraries.
Now, as an outcome of our strategic planning process, we have adopted the concept that we are one library with many physical locations. Our goal, simply stated, is to make the total resources of the University Libraries as equally and consistently available as possible to students and faculty at every UConn campus. Over the last eighteen months we have undertaken several initiatives to move in this direction.
The University Computing Center and the regional campus directors have been working to extend the University's telecommunications network to each of the regional campuses. Networking to the libraries at Avery Point, Hartford, Stamford, and Torrington is complete; the Waterbury library should be fully connected by the end of 1996. As this infrastructure has been put in place, the Libraries have been enabled to implement one of our major strategic initiatives: the development of gateway libraries.
The gateway library concept defines each UConn library as an access point to the total collections and services of the University Libraries system. Fundamental to this concept is having all libraries share the automated NOTIS library management system. When consulting HOMER, a student will finally see all library holdings together, with the location of every individual item identified by campus. A related project, when complete, will allow library users to view the holdings of the Health Center and the Law libraries as well. Displaying holdings in HOMER is an important first step in providing access to library resources, but it is not the final step. Staff are currently working on a project that will enable us to respond to user requests by delivering books among campuses within two days and transmitting facsimile copies within hours.
High quality telecommunications networking among all campuses will enable the University Libraries to use technology to deliver the best of developing digital information services to every campus. Electronic bibliographic and full-text services formerly available only in Storrs will become available system-wide. This will improve library service at regional campuses and, by eliminating duplicative stand-alone resources, will allow us to use information access funds more effectively. The Libraries' Network Services Team is currently analyzing new electronic products that will, for the first time, be purchased with the specific intent of enhancing library services at all campuses simultaneously.
Another significant benefit to be derived from viewing ourselves as one library is the planned centralization of acquisitions processing in Storrs. While selection of materials will remain in the hands of local selectors, we will consolidate our various contracts for purchasing books and subscribing to journals, enabling regional campus library staff to devote more of their time and energy to direct user support services. Consolidated contracts can also improve our purchasing power and stretch scarce collection development dollars.
As regional campuses continue to develop their individual missions and programs, our goal is to support them in doing so with the full benefit of the total information resources of the University Libraries at their fingertips. We are working to bridge time and place to provide the resources of a major research library wherever and whenever they are needed.
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