Expanding E-Services and Tools to Enhance User Access
The Libraries recognize the growing expectations of our users to provide services that allow access to services and resources not just in our library facilities but at home, in the office, or in the classroom. While the campus will continue to have a strong residential component, commuter students and distance education students (who may never even set foot on the College Park campus) expect services and resources equal to those available to users on site. Digital reference services, desktop article delivery, user empowerment capabilities, and digital library initiatives are means by which the Libraries will reach out electronically to all of those user groups, and the continued development and expansion of these services will require a reallocation of staff resources. Such efforts will also improve service within the College Park campus. All of these will require a reallocation of faculty and staff effort that we can only estimate, but which will require significant workforce planning.
Digital Reference Service Technology has also been a driver of change in public services. E-based help services have been adapted for use by libraries to provide reference services via e-mail and chat. Simultaneous with the expanded use of technology in libraries, site-based (face-to-face) reference declined nationally in academic libraries for several years and is now leveling off. It seems clear that this decline was a direct result of the introduction of large scale online reference and full text resources through the Libraries “gateway” Website and the intensive information literacy training that accompanied it. The Libraries have provided email reference service since 1998 and began a chat service in 2001. In 2003, the UM Libraries joined a pilot cooperative statewide chat service, Maryland AskUsNow!, giving us the capability of expanding to a 24/7 chat service for our users. Currently the chat service is staffed by 17 subject librarians who each contribute 1-2 hours/week, with assistance from staff in other areas of the libraries. As the Libraries mainstream and expand digital reference service, an increasing amount of human resources will need to be reallocated to it. For the subject librarian, this reallocation will have a direct impact on his/her other responsibilities: user education and collection management. Also, support staff resources will be affected as work formerly done by librarians may shift to them. For example, the expectation to maintain a service desk will continue for the five-year timeframe of this document, but the staffing might be provided to a large degree by non-librarian staff with adequate training to meet most user needs. Or, as chat and email questions are collected and analyzed over time, the Libraries may find that the other staff can respond to these queries and that a subject librarian’s expertise may not always be required. In summary, as library faculty in public services effort is shifted to the expanding instructional role and specialized e-services, staff must be retrained and their time reallocated to fill some of the traditional roles of such as reference and introductory level instruction such as “Library Safaris” (instructional tours).
User Empowerment Another area of technological impact is user-initiated services. Online gateways, a promising area of technology application, empower users to develop personalized access to library resources. The “my library” concept grants more control to users over their interactions with the library. In addition to being able to view their library accounts (for borrowed items, fines, due dates), users will be able to save searches and results, select key resources they consult regularly, arrange for update notifications of new resources, and personalize the interface to provide more direct access to relevant resources. As a result, front line staff may potentially have time freed up to devote to other endeavors. A shift in responsibilities will need to occur to support a focus on interface design, user testing, and system development. The planned installation of self-check units that allow users to circulate library materials without staff intervention may also lessen the demand for staffing the circulation service points while improving user ‘wait-time’ for this basic service.
Desktop Article Delivery A pilot program, Electronic Article Document Delivery, has been in place for over a year, testing faculty interest and resources required to deliver articles, owned and not owned by the UM Libraries, to faculty desktops. Expanding this program campus-wide will require additional resources through cost-recovery; a survey to participating faculty is being conducted this fall semester to test various pricing models. Human resources within Access Services that are currently assigned to stacks maintenance provide a potential pool of staff to be reallocated to this work and which may be partially funded by fees charged to users, pending an acceptable pricing model.
Digital Library Initiatives The Libraries have been building the infrastructure in staff and tools to support digital library initiatives. Increasingly the Libraries are finding the need for additional specialized staff to maintain the program. Once in place, the digital library will provide online access to a number of local special collections, thereby permitting more researchers to interact with unique source materials, as well as offering access to licensed materials in a variety of media formats (e.g., audio and video). The Libraries are already shifting staff from operations positions that were necessary in the past mainframe-computing model to tasks such as scanning materials for the digital library. This transition represents approximately $20,000 per annum in staff salaries and could reach as high as $80,000 per annum over this five-year period. In addition, the Libraries anticipate shifting resources in order to support metadata creation (i.e., description of digital objects for online retrieval) and management in a digital environment as noted above. The Technical Services Division will continue to seek sources of cataloging for materials acquired. Any resulting staff efficiencies would be devoted to cataloging materials in new formats. Currently there are three vacant faculty positions in Original Cataloging. One or more of these positions could be filled with a person having expertise in digital objects and alternative metadata description and encoding standards. These adjustments in responsibilities will require an investment in retraining. The goal of the digital library is to integrate what have been separate silos of information into a total Web experience.
Another area of significant digital library development is the creation of the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM). In part this project begins to address the issue of universities producing knowledge and buying it back from publishers. It also provides an opportunity to address the preservation of intellectual content for continuous access into the future. The system will provide a central repository for institutional and discipline specific information in the form of traditional scholarly communication, namely articles and research notes, as well as newer forms of knowledge represented in visualizations, data sets, and software, to name but a few. Projects such as this shift the nature of scholarly and creative publication and dissemination. They position libraries as the hub for recorded knowledge whatever the medium. This will require a more active role in marketing and supporting the service for collection development/management and public services staff. As noted above, the Libraries anticipate that a lessening emphasis on traditional print publishing over time will permit this shift in focus. For the time period discussed in this document, the repository project is likely to be the recipient of additional resources with nominal gain in efficiency or cost reduction. In the long term, however, this project and others like it hold the potential for significant transformative change in what libraries do, how they do it, and the overall cost of acquiring, maintaining, and providing access to knowledge. This change cannot occur without direct work with teaching faculty who produce new disciplinary knowledge.
The implementation of context sensitive linking technology in the libraries supports some freeing up of staff resources currently committed to maintaining online links to licensed resources in the catalog. Further development of Research Port, the UM Libraries new gateway to e-resources, as the primary means of access to e-resources will reduce the duplication of effort that occurs in developing and maintaining a separate web site interface for e-resources potentially yielding $3,000 in staff time that can be devoted to other aspects of digital library initiatives.
