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Good news about the Libraries’ budget this year!

The Executive Budget Committee allocated an additional $436,000 for library collections this year. These new funds should cover anticipated price increases for books, journals, and media, allowing us to maintain our current buying power. This will be the first year, in recent years, where we will not need to cancel journal subscriptions to cover the price increases for these materials.

In addition, we were allocated $50,000 to support the unmediated document delivery project for faculty. This service, which began last spring as a pilot project for the faculty in 12 academic departments, subsidizes access to commercial document delivery services for journal articles not found in our collections. These services deliver copies of the articles within about 48 hours, usually by fax to the department office, sometimes directly to the requester’s desktop computer in digital format. With this permanent funding, we will be making this service available to faculty in all WSU departments this fall.

Finally, the Libraries have also been given considerable funds to upgrade electronic equipment. The most notable improvement will be in the Online Classroom in the New Library. Although the microcomputers in this facility are only three years old, they seriously need to be upgraded to allow us to teach students information retrieval skills using current software. Other public use workstations throughout the Libraries will also be upgraded.

I might also mention that the Libraries will be upgrading our microform reader/printers this year with accruals from vacant library faculty positions. Microforms may be "old technology," but we have many valuable resources in micro-format and the collections are heavily used. The readers and reader/printers are quite worn and badly in need of replacement.

Like all departments on campus, it was necessary for the Libraries to take a 1% reallocation cut from our operations/personnel budgets. To meet this need, we gave up a vacant library faculty position in our Serials department, along with $26,000 worth of operations funds. The latter reduction was particularly difficult as we scrambled to maintain our open hours schedule this fall in light of the 1% reduction and the minimum wage increase. But, I am pleased to say, we have managed to sustain our hours.

As always, I am deeply grateful for all the support we have received from the WSU faculty. Your continued support undoubtedly resulted in this wonderful budget.

Beginning in the fall of 1994, the WSU Libraries led a small group of Washington universities — UW, EWU, CWU, WSU-Tri Cities, and Seattle U — in a joint subscription to electronic databases offered to students and faculty via OCLC FirstSearch. The system is simple to use and may be accessed either in the Libraries or over the Internet from offices or residences. By subscribing jointly, the Libraries were able to provide this access for less than if WSU Pullman had subscribed alone.

In 1997-98, led by WSU, this consortium has been expanded to include a total of 32 libraries in Washington and Oregon. Members include our original group of libraries and Evergreen; four additional private colleges in the Seattle area; the colleges and universities in Orbis, an online union catalog and resource sharing consortium headquartered at the University of Oregon and including Whitman College; and the members of PORTALS, a consortium of 16 libraries in the Portland area including WSU-Vancouver and Clark College.

The buying power of this larger group has enabled the WSU Libraries to offer more databases to students and faculty for approximately the same cost. The databases available to WSU students and faculty this year include WorldCat, which is the entire OCLC database of 36 million titles cataloged by the 8,000 OCLC libraries worldwide; ArticleFirst, an index to general purpose periodicals; ERIC; the MLA Bibliography; PsycInfo; Sociological Abstracts; Agricola; Applied Science and Technology Index; Books in Print; CINAHL; and the World Almanac. These databases may be accessed through Griffin, the WSU Libraries online catalog.

There are other FirstSearch databases to which we do not subscribe because their level of use is too low to justify a subscription. WSU students and faculty may search those databases by obtaining a "search card" from a reference librarian. Each search card allows a user to perform up to 10 free searches on the FirstSearch databases to which WSU does not subscribe.

The libraries of Washington’s public universities have acted as a consortium to improve services and increase access to electronic resources in an increasing number of cooperative projects in the past several years. One of the newest is a joint subscription to ProQuest Direct from University Microfilms International (UMI).

ProQuest Direct is a Web-based information service providing online access to one of the most extensive collections of published material in the world. With ProQuest Direct, users can search for information in thousands of different journals, periodicals, dissertations, newspapers, and magazines in UMI's vast archives.

Two of the databases in ProQuest Direct, ABI/Inform (ABI) and Periodical Abstracts Research II (PA II), have been used by WSU students, faculty, and staff as part of Griffin for more than a year. The two provide access to the full text of articles in over 1,000 journals, and the Libraries will continue to load them in Griffin for at least the next year.

In ProQuest Direct, articles from over 1,000 ABI and PA II journals are available as page images instead of, or in addition to, ASCII full text, and some of the articles in ASCII text have charts or tables as well. Faculty may direct the system to fax a text or image article at no charge to the fax number specified by the user. Also the Libraries will be offering the printing of articles at selected locations for a fee.

The ProQuest Direct subscription also includes access to Dissertation Abstracts; Newspaper Abstracts, with full text from The Atlanta Journal, Atlanta Constitution, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, New York Times Book Review, New York Times Magazine, New York Times, USA TODAY, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; and the full text of selected state of Washington newspapers.

If a ProQuest Direct search retrieves a citation without full text or images of the articles, you may still obtain a copy of the article. Check Griffin to see if the Libraries own the journal. If not, request your article via Interlibrary Loan. Or, through ProQuest Direct, you may request that UMI send copies of the articles for a fee. Faculty may order them directly, and the fees will be paid by the Libraries through our new faculty document delivery project. Students and staff must enter a credit card number.

Access to educational articles and documents with an ease and availability that formerly could only be dreamt of is now available to users on campus and off. ERIC is the Educational Resources Information Center. It contains citations to over 666,000 items on education research and practice, including everything from academic excellence to classroom techniques to merit pay to substance abuse to charter schools. Many of the articles cited, and most of the documents, are available in the Brain Education Library (Cleveland 130) on the Pullman campus or through extended campus library services.

How do you search this massive database? There are several access avenues. You can search from 2 dedicated CD-ROM stations in the Brain Education Library. There are thesauri, and lists of covered titles available in the library, at the stations. Using these tools will make selecting terms to search and finding journals a lot easier. The search engine will let you browse, combine terms and concepts, limit your results by year or journal name or other criteria, backup, and of course print and download; OR: You can search through the Libraries' online catalog, Griffin. You can do this from any library, or any office/home/dorm computer which can access Griffin.

There are two ways into ERIC from Griffin. You can select FirstSearch, then the Education topic area, then ERIC to search by author, title, or subject. This is the simplest search engine, and therefore the crudest search. If you have just a name, or a straightforward term to search, FirstSearch works.

Physics E-Journals

Physics professional associations were among the first publishers to offer free-electronic-with-print subscriptions to their journals. While most other publishers (commercial and association) have waited and watched the developing electronic market for acceptance by users and initial pricing, Institute of Physics (IOP), American Institute of Physics (AIP), and American Physical Society (APS) forged ahead with free electronic journal access and innovative features. The WSU Libraries now offer around 36 physics-related titles over the Internet. Check out these addresses (you must be coming in through a WSU IP address):

You can now obtain quality color prints from electronic journals or other web sources from our Tektronix Phaser 350 which is now set up in the Veterinary Medical/Pharmacy Library, 170 Wegner Hall. Prices are $.50 per page for color and $.25 per page for black and white. Paper copies of scanned images are also available at $2.35 for color and $2.15 for b&w. The printer is available from 8am-5pm, Monday-Friday only. Ask at the Circulation Desk (335-9556) for information or assistance.

The Fischer Ag Sci Library in Johnson Annex recently installed an e-mail terminal for student use and 3 new Pentium terminals. These additions provide Fischer Library users with ready access to Netscape, Biological Abstracts, Wildlife Reviews and other on-line reference tools not previously available at this library. With the Fischer Ag Sci Library's existing 3 Griffin terminals and AGRICOLA CD-ROM workstation, this brings our total to 8 public access terminals, all of which are almost constantly busy.

The Brain Education Library in Cleveland Hall has lightened up by removing the old, cracked and yellowed original deflectors from the lights in the public areas. So far comments have been running 9:1 for the change – you can actually see the call numbers of books on the shelves! We'd like to know what you think -- stop by and check it out, along with the relocated reference desk and all the neat new signs to help you find your way around. (There's even a new suggestion box.)

The Consolidated Libraries include the Hanford Technical Library (HTL), the US Department of Energy (DOE) Public Reading Room for the Columbia Basin region, and the WSU Tri-Cities Max E. Benitz Memorial Library. The housing of these three libraries in one facility is unique, because each one operates separately with a unique and separate funding base and administration. In this sense, the three units occupy the same space in the same building, but are not actually fully merged. There is some overlap in services, as one unit serves the clients of another whenever necessary and appropriate, but generally each unit serves its unique clientele on a day to day basis.