The most important role of the Library in dealing with the crisis in scholarly communication is to act as a change agent. In order to accomplish this goal of creating a scholarly communication system that meets the needs of SIUE, Lovejoy Library needs to do the following:
1) Promote awareness of issues to all of the key constituencies within the academic arena -- faculty, staff, students and administration.
2) Ensure that all of these groups understand what role they play within the current system as well as the roles that the current partners (i.e. publishers and librarian) play within the system.
3) Create awareness within the University community on how the reward system (promotion and tenure guidelines) impacts the design of an effective communication system.
4) Develop a vision for a scholarly communication system which meets the needs of researchers and students to enhance the overall research and educational process, and
5) Develop a system which meets these multiple needs and objectives.
Lovejoy Library staff are committed to not only raise awareness of the issues, but to also serve as advocates for researchers and students, propose possible solutions, and continue to develop tools which aid in the organization, classification, and discovery of information, as well as aiding in instructing users on how to effectively utilize these tools.
Lovejoy Library has been tranferring many of its print and microform journal subscriptions to their online formats to provide the most timely and broadest access to their content. For all practical purposes, the journals are available 24 hours per day from anywhere in the world that the SIUE community has access to the Internet. The Library tries to acquire perpetual access (acquiring rights to content for the year's licensed) so that backfiles will be available in future years.
As more books are created and distributed electronically, Lovejoy Library will provide access to online versions when they are reasonably priced and easily accessible.
Lovejoy Library is also committed to providing access to high quality open access resources.
One of the essential roles of the Library is to aid in the discovery of needed information. As more and different methods of publishing and distributing scholarly information are developed, the abiliy to locate information becomes more complex.
The traditional methods of using index and abstract databases (some with partial or full text content) are still important, although many of these are experiencing the same increase in costs as are journals. Lovejoy Library faculty attempt to make the discovery and access to important information sources available through the creation of subject guides (including many new LibGuides). The Library's reference and instruction staff work closely with teaching faculty to aid students in the discovery, acquisition and ethical use of information sources.
Repositories of information, whether institution based, subject based, or format based, also present unique challenges in terms of locating and accessing the information located within the repository. Digitizing unique materials in its collections to make them more accessible and creating a repository for the information produced by SIUE faculty, students and staff are also a major commitments for LIS.
Lovejoy Library recognizes that no matter how generously funded it cannot obtain all materials that may be needed for educational and research purposes. Therefore, the ability to borrow materials from other libraries has been one of our essential services. As the percentage of scholarly material that the Library is able to acquire and provide access to continues to decline, the amount of material that needs to be borrowed also increases.
LIS staff are committed to participating in resource sharing efforts that make the resources of other libraries available to our users. Participation in the Consortium of Academic Libraries and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) I-Share statewide catalog and the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) WorldCat global catalog make resources from these member libraries available to SIUE users and Lovejoy Library's collections available to users throughout Illinois and the world.
There are laws and guidelines related to the amount and frequency of borrowing which can take place before copyright fees must be paid. LIS absorbs the cost of these fees as well as the additional costs in terms of staff time to provide this essential service.
The function of placing high demand items on reserve to provide a quick and convenient place for students to obtain supplemental readings, lecture notes, etc. has been a traditional role of academic libraries. The advent of the Internet and growth of electronic content, much of which must be licensed for use, has had an effect on this process.
The Library absorbs many of the fees related to this function, including scanning items for placement into the electronic reserve system and absorbing copyright fees which might result from providing access to the materials placed on reserve.
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