In FY98/99, this library (attached to a Carnegie
Comprehensive university of 13,000 students and faculty) saw
a decline in many traditional use measures including gate
entrance counts and number of photocopies made. The latter
measure declined about 20% and no new copying alternatives
are available nearby.
These numbers may be an aberration, but I am beginning to
take them as a clear indicator that the library's growing
number of electronic sources, particularly fulltext, allow
students and faculty to satisfy perceived (!) needs outside
the building. We currently subsidize in-library printing
from our workstations. If we begin charging for printing, I
suspect there would be an even more dramatic fall in the
gate count as patrons use personal printers or capture text
to their mega-gigabyte hard drives.
This phenomenon isn't news, but when it may be clearly
happening in a somewhat traditional mid-sized university and
former 'normal' school like Appalachian State, the trend
likely has much more forward inertia than I knew. The death
of the paper collection (outside the humanities) is
advancing faster than I suspected. A vendor called today
with two interesting but not unique subject encyclopedias,
when asked if they are available in network cd-rom or www
versions and the answer was 'no,' I decided I'd likely wait
until they are.
What do your IPEDS use measure numbers look like this year
vs. the last? I'll summarize answers to remove attribution.
--
John P. Abbott
Coordinator, Collection Development
ASU Libraries
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608-2026
phone: 828-262-2821
fax: 828-262-3001
email: abbottjp_at_appstate.edu
"...the next century will require libraries to resolve their
confusion about whether they are tools for their
institutions to compete with one another, or whether they
exist first and foremost to provide services..." -Ross
Atkinson in _Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical
Services_, Summer 1999.
Received on Thu Aug 26 1999 - 09:07:19 EDT