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University Libraries' Strategic Plan

• Strategic Alternatives
• Vision
• Strategic Focus
• External Assessment
• Internal Assessment
• Goals and Strategies
• Measures of Success

Strategic Alternatives

Digital Future

The next twenty years will be difficult ones for academic libraries. In particular, three issues affect Carnegie Mellon's aspirations to arrive early at a digital future:

• Digital information costs from 25 to over 300% more than paper information.
• Provisions that allow Carnegie Mellon students and faculty to use Oakland Library Consortium paper resources do not apply to remote use of most digital resources, which are licensed for specific communities.
• Cost of converting paper to digital resources (when copyright has expired or permission is obtained) runs from about $100 to $500 per volume.

Unique Circumstances

Historically, Carnegie Mellon University has succeeded in education and research while providing less funding for its libraries than competitors. The proximity of The Carnegie Library and the University of Pittsburgh's libraries has allowed forging consortial relationships as an inconvenient but effective alternative to building large libraries. Further, the most dramatic period of library collection expansion was from 1850 to 1900, before the university's founding.

At the instigation of the faculty advisory group, the Libraries' benchmarking efforts sought to go beyond traditional measures (numbers of volumes, numbers of staff and total dollars expended). Two measures of traditional library use were available from standard IPEDS data. In these measures, circulation per FTE student/faculty and reference questions per FTE student/faculty, Carnegie Mellon scored the lowest among three comparators from the Association for Research Libraries and three smaller academic libraries. However, in measures of digital library use, online catalog and database usage per student and faculty, Carnegie Mellon was in second place among those collecting data. These rankings correlate with the highest percentage of remote use among the group. Together, these data support the Libraries' interest in automated reference assistance, in the HELIOS Project with Senator Heinz' papers, and in other digital initiatives.

Advisory boards and accrediting groups have repeatedly chastened Carnegie Mellon for its lack of commitment to libraries. Trying to remedy the omissions of the past through massive investment in paper collections will not be as effective as initiatives to leap-frog ahead of the paper collection building phase and arrive early at a predicted digital future.

Paper Collections

Nevertheless, the paper environment continues to be relevant and important to our community. Undergraduates, in particular, use our paper collections and appreciate the supportive atmosphere of the library as a place where assistance from peers and librarians is readily accessible. An extensive collection analysis project, completed this year, has revealed that Carnegie Mellon lacks adequate resources to support undergraduate work in selected collections (modern languages, history and anthropology, and environmental studies). Because undergraduates are less tenacious information seekers than graduates and faculty, and because consortial relationships assume that undergraduate needs will be met by their institutions, the libraries desperately need funding to build up weak collection areas. Further, researchers in the humanities and social sciences continually complain that Carnegie Mellon collections are inadequate for scholarly work in those fields.

Metacurricular Factors

According to legend, Andrew Carnegie rejected the idea of building a library for Carnegie Institute of Technology because he thought that The Carnegie Library was convenient enough. Convenience has a much higher value today, and visionaries in computer science rate ease of use and convenience as the number one research agenda for the future. Inconvenience, which often means an expenditure of time, has a negative effect on faculty productivity. And students rate convenience high among their factors in making choices. Convenient library access and connectivity contribute to their perceptions about the quality of student life.

The library as a place -- with a traditional book collection, resources in a variety of media and the infrastructure to support their use, librarians to help students, an atmosphere of scholarship and collaboration, and gateways to the collections of other libraries -- continues to be valuable to students and faculty. Beyond the support of the information resources, the library provides a focal point for education, research, study and individual inquiry at the university. Metacurricular factors such as these are key issues in recruitment and retention, especially as Carnegie Mellon's identity continues to expand its focus beyond its technical origins.

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Carnegie Mellon University Libraries will provide creative, expert and technologically advanced information services designed to be responsive to the present and continually changing information needs of the university community.

Mission

• To support and contribute to the teaching, research, artistic and other scholarly endeavors of the university.
• To acquire, organize, make accessible, maintain and preserve information resources for optimal use.
• To contribute to and disseminate knowledge about library services, resources and access to distributed information.

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The University Libraries aspire to attain a status suitable to that of the university. As digital initiatives grow, we see that Carnegie Mellon can provide for the university and for the international scientific and scholarly community:

• Technical expertise in digital library development issues
• Demonstration digital library projects
• Exemplary digital instructional programs
• Automated reference assistance that students can use remotely
• Intuitive, easy to use systems

Given the quality of our institution, we are in a position to develop and demonstrate innovative technologies, establish standards, and provide leadership in digital library initiatives for an international community. We can be a library against which all others interested in digital initiatives would wish to benchmark.

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• Information is now doubling every two to three years, instead of every ten.
• The advent of the World Wide Web has changed student perceptions about how to identify information resources but only about 5% of web information is refereed.
• Glut has replaced scarcity as an information seeking challenge. Librarians, with the help of computer scientists, must assist students and faculty in focusing their attention on the most relevant information available.
• The emerging digital library requires that local libraries have high-end computers for students and staff, and that these be replaced at least every two years under the precepts of Moore's Law.²
• Forty percent of the libraries' university funding is spent on purchasing books and journals and licensing electronic materials the prices of which are externally controlled.
• Carnegie Mellon journal expenditures have increased by almost 600% in the last twenty years, four to five times the economy's inflation rate.
• Libraries are a third party payer in the scientific and scholarly communications system.
• The most prolific scientific and technical commercial publishers make profits of 40 to 55%.
• Electronic versions of existing journals sell for 125 to over 200% of the paper subscription costs.
• Diversification into formats such as slides, videos, computer programs, and compact disks is technically feasible as bandwidth and storage increase, but will require new library strategies.
• Computer storage will not be a constraint in an environment where a petabyte will hold the contents of a billion books (more than have ever been published).
• Revisions to the Copyright Law may diminish Fair Use provisions that now allow the scientific and scholarly community to share information somewhat freely.

¹Based on continuing environmental scans.

² Moore's law was first laid out by Intel co-founded Gordon Moore. It states that the processsing power of a computer chip gets twice as powerful every 18 months, while its prices stay the same.

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Students' Priorities:

• Expand access to electronic collections (journals, indexes, compilations, etc.); specifically, networked access with supported printing.
• Expand print collections, particularly books and journals.
• Create an inviting and appropriate study environment in the library to facilitate individual and group study.
• Find ways to increase market awareness about collections and services in the Libraries.
• Negotiate improved access to the collections and services at Oakland Library Consortium member libraries, especially the length of the loan period and access to databases.

Faculty and Departments' Priorities:

• Improve convenience and speed in the interlibrary loan system.
• Improve privileges in the Oakland Library Consortium for graduate students and faculty.
• Improve access to all non-book materials and assist with creating electronic indexed archives of slides and other resources, especially for the Fine Arts.
• Reexamine internal library practices, such as loan periods, book returns, and electronic aids.

Faculty and Departments' Concerns:

• Favor the idea of a digital library but are concerned about its cost.
• Understand the economic dysfunctions in the scientific and scholarly communications system and will continue to make journal cuts as needed, but would appreciate greater university support of the Libraries' materials budget.
• Want new or expanded library facilities in order to provide adequate instructional and seating spaces for students, storage for collections and workspace for staff, but agree that a depository facility would meet minimum short-term needs.
• Are concerned about poor student information-seeking practices (most notably, exclusive use of the World Wide Web as a source).

³ Based on student focus groups in September 1998, and meetings with academic departments in April and May 1998.

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Create the Digital Library

• Add to the funding for commercial digital resources ($100,000).
• In conjunction with School of Computer Science, develop these projects:
  • Automated reference assistance (foundations, OCLC partnership).
  • Global registry of works that have been digitized to avoid duplication.
  • Selective digitization of out-of-copyright works that have been requested on interlibrary loan with successive OCR and correction.
  • Mechanisms for delivery of digitized texts to requesters.
  • More scanning of out-of-copyright books to build the Universal Library.
  • Lobbying for new economic models and statutory changes to promote digital libraries.

• In conjunction with appropriate departments, facilitate access to large research databases (status quo funding).
• Encourage and support cutting edge access for remote users, as recommended by the Computing and Communications group.
• Encourage faculty to work in their scholarly societies to decouple certification of the value of work from print publication (no local funding).

Target the Right Information

• Bring undergraduate paper collections in Modern Languages, History and Anthropology, and Environmental Studies to basic levels ($101-106,000 a year; foundations, appeal to alumni, university funding).
• Create a program approval process that will ensure that library resource needs are considered in decision making and funded as new programs are adopted (no immediate funding).

Retool Library Facilities for the 21st Century

• Seek external funding for new buildings, renovations, and additions (foundations, alumni, friends).

Manage the Libraries Effectively

• Evaluate services and make improvements based on the needs of the university community.
• Enhance the information literacy program to teach all aspects of information use, focusing on effective research skills, and to prepare students to apply research skills in diverse contexts and professional careers.
• For librarians, archivists, and other professionals: Develop a program of peer review, promotion and compensation that fosters and rewards intellectual growth and excellence.
• For support staff and paraprofessionals: Develop a program of job enrichment, regular reclassification review, and appropriate compensation.
• Develop and implement a plan to market all library services.
• Develop and implement fundraising activities to augment collections, facilities and staffing.
• Maintain a robust technology infrastructure.
• Recruit and retain a diverse staff that reflects the university's affirmative action policy goals.
• Provide formal and informal training and support so that staff have the skills to work to their full potential.
• Maintain a continuous strategic-planning cycle complementary to the libraries' quality improvement program.

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The truest measure of success is the degree to which students' learning and faculty teaching and research productivity are enhanced by their use of library resources. Both student and faculty barriers are reported in the internal assessment. For both groups, improvements in quantity of resources -- both electronic and paper -- are indicated. Enhanced privileges within the Oakland Library Consortium are also a priority. Both groups also request continued improvement of library services and spaces. The University Librarian and the Libraries' Council (the persons responsible) will pursue benchmarking measures, as begun in this plan, continued surveys and focus groups with students, and ongoing conversations with faculty to measure success.

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