ULC Annual Report 1994-95

Library Landmarks and Highlights

The new Business Library opened in Grainger Hall at the beginning of the spring semester 1994. The number of users tripled as students and visitors were drawn to this handsome new environment for research and study. At the same time, the Social Work Library also moved to an attractive new facility.

The new Memorial Library InfoLab opened at the beginning of the spring semester 1994. Funded by DoIT and jointly managed in cooperation with the General Library System, the new InfoLab has 120 workstations and is the largest open access computing facility for students on the campus. From the outset, the facility has been filled to capacity.

Library instruction programs were presented to 18,000 students during 1993-94. This is the equivalent of 32 sixteen-week, three-credit courses. Student demand for training in information retrieval continued to grow during the 1994 fall semester with attendance increasing by 37% compared to fall 1993.

Conversion of the old card catalog to an electronic format continued in the 1994-95 fiscal year. Because more than 380,000 titles have been added to the electronic catalog since the beginning of the conversion project, UW-Madison library resources are more visible and accessible throughout Wisconsin and to the global research community via the internet. The UW-Madison libraries moved up from fourth to third in the Association of Research Libraries ranking for the number of items lent to other libraries.

Email reference services were established at Memorial Library, Wendt Engineering, Steenbock, the Health Sciences, and Pharmacy libraries. All of the major campus libraries continued to expand coordinated research and document delivery for faculty.

Since January, 1995, users of Memorial Library are able to renew and recall their library materials using email.

College Library successfully implemented the use of a survey to measure the perceptions and priorities of library users. The College Library survey, which is based on an emerging standard methodology for measuring customer satisfaction, is being used to develop a general survey of UW-Madison library users.

Beginning in fall semester 1994, Steenbock Library established document delivery, interlibrary loan, and reference services to the county-based Extension faculty and staff. The pilot project is financially supported by UW Extension and will be reviewed at the end of this fiscal year.

UW-Madison libraries have continued to expand interlibrary cooperative programs identified in the strategic plans of the libraries in the University of Wisconsin System and the CIC universities. Beginning in December 1994, the library system began testing library software which will allow faculty and graduate students to make direct interlibrary loan requests from other CIC research libraries.

The General Library System implemented a reciprocal borrowing policy that increases UW System access to the research collections of UW-Madison libraries. Since the beginning of the 1994 fall semester more than 500 students from other UW campuses were issued borrower's cards by Memorial Library.

Some of the most popular undergraduate databases (Readers Guide, Business Periodicals Index, etc.) were moved to the same computing platform as the online catalog in order to improve their accessibility to the campus library users. The majority of library computing transactions now take place on low- cost smaller computers (such as the IBM RS6000).

UW-Madison campus libraries have established a state-of-the-art integrated network of information resources in the CD-ROM format. Operating on powerful PC workstation computers instead of a mainframe computing platform, the networks provide highly cost-effective access for more than 100 databases. It is expected that the number of user log-ons will exceed 500,000 during this fiscal year.

Last modified July 7, 1998