Monday, November 23, 2009 East Central Illinois
The Answer Book 2005
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UI Library working to stay on top BY PAUL WOOD © 2009 THE NEWS-GAZETTE URBANA - If the windowless stacks look foreboding to you, don't be put off the largest public university library in the country is open to you, online or in person. One of its outstanding collections, in fact, contains about 15,000 books that not a tax dollar was spent on. The Center for Children's Books collects and reviews children's books sent out by publishers for free. It has a sale every winter that raises money for the graduate students who work on the project, said its director, Betsy Hearne, a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and an author herself.
It remains the third-largest college library, with more than 10 million volumes.They're not all in one building, as the University of Chicago brags, and that's a good thing, Kaufman believes considering the danger of fire or water damage. Recently, the library opened its Oak Street facility, which takes rarely used material out of the stacks and stores it in ideal temperature and humidity. The $12 million project means the bar-coded books can still be easily accessed, she said. "For instance, users can request a book through the catalog and have it delivered to a library near them," she said. "There's a reading room there." Given the digital revolution, the UI library also has sizable holdings that don't require the killing of trees. Reserve reading, once heavily dependent on copy machines, is now mostly electronic, so students don't have to come in and make even more copies. The online research resources continue to grow, adding interactive reference sources, abstracts and link directories. "People have come to expect information at their fingertips in the format of their choice," Kaufman said. The library has been running a campus campaign to raise money not only for collections and their preservation, but for faculty retention and endowing faculty positions, she said. "Preservation seems to attract a lot of interest because people understand the value of this huge resource," she said. But there are recurring problems in keeping up with academic journals. "We're seeing inflation rates of 9 to 10 percent a year. Even if the UI was awash in money, it would be difficult to keep up," Kaufman said. "And the decline in (the value of the) dollar makes foreign books more expensive." The UI's collection budget is less than that of such peers as Penn State, she added. Recent highlights have been a "Save America's Treasures" grant to preserve materials in the Carl Sandburg papers collection. The library also was awarded a $2.75 million grant from the Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure Project. The ECHO DEPository is a three-year digital preservation research and development project funded by the Library of Congress under its National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program. |
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