University Library in 2006

This is a guest posting from the University Librarian, John Redmayne.

Budget
The Library has received notice of its capital grant for the year (which pays for our books and journals). In particular, we have been able to increase the book budget across allocations by an average 7%, which should enable us to cope with book publishers’ increases and some movement in the New Zealand dollar. The allocation for electronic databases and e-journals includes an 8% increase for publishers’ prices, and the print (paper) serials (a diminishing portion nowadays of our collections budget) still allows for a 10% increases in publishers’ costs.
Of course, there is a certain nervousness about the value of the New Zealand dollar later in the year when we pay our subscription renewals. The budget includes a sum for such a contingency, and the Finance Section of the Registry also purchases forward currency for us (mostly in US dollars these days). We will continue to monitor currency movements carefully during the year, but generally the 2006 capital grant is good news for the Library, and further action will need to be taken only of the dollar drops severely.

Backfiles
At the end of 2005 we took advantage of the strong dollar to make some significant one-off purchases.
For business this included the purchase of subject backfiles for Elsevier’s Sciencedirect. Despite its name, ScienceDirect includes significant business titles, as it is really a database of all 1700 journal titles published by Elsevier, a major international publisher of academic titles. We have suggested to Elsevier several times that they need to remove the “Science” of ScienceDirect, but to no avail! The database is very useful because it has the full text of journal articles, and the general service is for the contents from 1995.
In 2004 ands late in 2005 we have been purchasing selective subject archives which go back to the first issue of each journal whenever it was published. Our first purchase in 2004 was the Business subject backfile (of 65 titles) and in late 2005 we bought the subject file for Economics, econometrics and finance (some 71 titles).
In additional we have been piloting some electronic books and have taken out a subscription to Safari’s e-books for business. This is well worth a look, and should be particularly useful for distance students.

Rodski Survey
In September 2005 the Library participated in the Rodski client satisfaction survey, and thank you to those who completed the online survey form.
Rodski is an independent company, and the library survey has been completed by all of the Australian university libraries and 4 of the 8 New Zealand university libraries, so it is very useful for benchmarking, as well as for the individual results. We have over 200 pages of specific comments from Massey library users and we are working our way through these at the moment.
The overall result was pleasing, with Rodski placing the library in the first quartile (top 25%) compared with the other libraries on their database. The greatest gap differential between expectation and performance was for library facilities and equipment. But in service quality, service delivery and library staff Massey ranked as well in the top 5 for the 15 Australasian university libraries who completed the survey in 2005.

Digital repository trial
In 2006, the Library will be trialling the ProQuest Digital Commons software, with some pilot projects for both digital theses and research papers, and making these available on the web.
Three other New Zealand university libraries will also be trialling this software. This is the precursor to the eventual establishment of an institutional repository, which is a much larger project, and for which Massey is an international partner in the RUBRIC project with a number of Australian universities, and with Gerrit Bahlman, our ITS Director, as a Board member.

John Redmayne
University Librarian.