Winter 2002 Edition

Dedication Ceremony for The Jane M. Bingham Historical Children's Literature Collection
A special ceremony dedicating the Jane M. Bingham Historical Children's Literature Collection was held in the Kresge Library on March 7th, and was attended by many Oakland University colleagues, friends, and dignitaries.  Speakers at the ceremony included Dr. Elaine Didier, Dean of the Library; Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dr. Virinder Moudgil; Dr. Mary Otto, Dean of the School of Education and Human Services; and Jane M. Bingham, retired Professor of Reading, Language Arts, and Children's Literature.  The unique collection, donated by Professor Bingham, is located on the north end of the Kresge Library, 2nd floor, and features not only historical children's books, but also a selection of posters and a showcase of realia.

Database Trials Available
Periodically Kresge Library receives limited-time trials of various databases.  Please see our Trial Databases page to access these resources.  If you would like to share your opinion of a trial database with us, please feel free to fill out the feedback form on that page.

A RECORD YEAR for Library Instruction
During the 2000-2001 academic year the Oakland University Library faculty  taught a record number of library instruction classes. Reaching over one quarter of the student body (4363 students), the instructional sessions used lectures and active learning exercises to teach students how to select and use library resources, devise appropriate search strategies, and evaluate results. There were 96 Rhetoric classes and over 100 discipline specific classes. Over 80 students also took advantage of research consultations which provide one-on-one assistance to them. To schedule a library session for your class or sign up for a research consultation contact Frank Lepkowski (2497).

Course WebCT and the Library
The Library instituted a Course WebCT component in the fall semester to familiarize Rhetoric 160 students with basic library information prior to their formal library sessions. Taking the form of an interactive tutorial, students learned basic searching techniques for books and journal articles. Library faculty then met with each class for 2 hour sessions to cover more advanced topics such as Boolean search strategies, critical evaluation of sources, and discipline-oriented databases. Elizabeth Kraemer served as the point person for this new endeavor, developing, testing and fine-tuning the modules, then training the library and rhetoric faculty in its use.

New Electronic Resources added.
The Library's full text journal collection continues to grow. New collections this year include:

ACM Digital Library (36 titles)--includes the journals, magazines and proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery.

American Chemical Society E-Journals (33 titles)

IEEE-Xplore(108 titles)-- full-text access to transactions, journals, and magazines published since 1998 of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

INFORMS PubsOnline (10 titles)-- Journals from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

Senate Library Committee Report
The Senate Library Committee presented an informational report to the Senate in which the Committee compared Oakland's library collections, library journals holdings and staffing levels to selected peer institutions. A copy of the report and the accompanying Powerpoint presentation is available at http://www.oakland.edu/senate/ library.html.  In the light of the report the Senate responded by endorsing the recommendations of the Committee, specifically: 1) To conform to the NCA  recommendations of 1989, 1994, and 1999, Kresge Library should receive automatic annual increases to its base budget to compensate for library inflation rates; 2) Money appropriated for new academic programs should be delivered to Kresge Library immediately after Board of Trustees' approval of the program and before admission of students into the program; 3) To keep Kresge Library in compliance with the goals of the OU 2010 Profile, the library budget of FY 2010 should be double the current budget. This  increase should occur in regular annual increments to both the materials budget and the positions budget, reflecting an increase to the Academic Affairs future base budget. One tangible result of this report was additional money allocated to the library base budget by the Provost this year, the first increase since 1994.

Periodical prices up  8.3%!
According to an article in American Libraries (May 2001), the average price for a journal rose from $241.54 to $261.56, an 8.3% rate of increase, down 0.7 of a percentage point from last year. The article notes that the rate has been very similar over the past four years with 9.9% and 10.3% increases posted in 1997 and 1998, respectively, and  10.4% and 9.0% in 1999 and 2000. The most expensive are Russian translations, chemistry, physics and medical journals, in that order.

At Oakland, the most expensive title is Tetrahedron Letters at $9,036 for the 2001 subscription.  Of the Library's 2000+ subscriptions, the top 25 most expensive OU journals cost the university over $100,000.

For more information --and some startling comparisons--on the challenges of the rising costs of library materials see "The best things in life aren't free: Library costs in the real world."

last updated:  4/04/2002 BK
comments to: Linda Hildebrand