VIVA Outreach

Publicity & Promotional Materials

Hurt, Charlene. "Building the Foundations of Virginia's Virtual Library."
in Virginia Librarian 40(3) (July-Sept.1994): 12-15.

Note: This HTML file was transcribed from the original paper format.

Virginia Librarian
July-September 1994
Vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 12-15

Building the Foundations of Virginia's Virtual Library

By Charlene Hurt

In 1993 the directors of the state-supported academic libraries of Virginia proposed a budget initiative designed to radically increase the amount of resource sharing by their libraries. They would expand on their history of cooperation through use of new technological developments. The impetus for the initiative came from the State Council of Higher Education, Virginia (SCHEV), and the proposal was developed by a subcommittee of the Library Advisory Committee of SCHEV. Funding of $5.2 million dollars for the biennial budget of 1994-96 was approved by the General Assembly for "Building the Foundations of the Commonwealth's Virtual Library."

During the two years prior to the budget proposal, Virginia's state-supported academic libraries had accomplished several initiatives to improve resource sharing, discussed below.

Establishment of the Virginia Academic Library Consortium

VALC (Virginia Academic Library Consortium) built on the success of a pilot project during 1991-92 in which James Madison University, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech demonstrated the feasibility of substituting access to materials for ownership when prompt delivery of those materials could be assured. The VALC agreement consists of a number of specific points to which the academic libraries agreed, including increasing the kinds of materials available on interlibrary loan, using fax and digital technology and alternative package delivery services to speed up loan transactions, adherence to copyright regulations and payment of royalties as appropriate, and refraining from levying fees for this service. Most importantly, the VALC libraries agreed "to strive to respond to requests for interlibrary loans from all state-supported academic libraries, including the community colleges, within 24 hours of receipt, and to process the requests within 48 hours of receipt." (1)

Cooperative Collection Development

During this period the VALC libraries also developed a joint database of their major microform holdings and began sharing lists of journal titles being considered for deletion or addition to their subscription lists. Five of the doctoral institutions jointly purchased the English Poetry Full-Text Database, a database of the entire corpus of English poetry from the beginning to 1900, and agreed to load it onto the computer at the University of Virginia, accessible by Internet.

Purchase of Software Designed for Resource Sharing

The three NOTIS online system institutions (George Mason University, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Commonwealth University) began the process of purchasing software that would enable them to provide each other's online catalogs, including call number, location, and status information, as part of their online information systems and permit user-initiated interlibrary loan. Since then William and Mary and the Virginia Community College System have also become NOTIS sites, and other library systems are developing similar capability through development of the Z39.50 interface, which will enable communication across different online catalog systems.

Concurrent with these developments was the establishment of the Virginia Library and Information Network (VLIN) by the Virginia State Library and Archives. All of the academic libraries are participants in that network, and the proposal was designed to build on the network and allow future expansion to other types of libraries through VLIN.

When the opportunity to develop a budget proposal was presented to the SCHEV Library Advisory Committee, the group had already given considerable thought to what was necessary for any effective expansion of resource-sharing activities. All agreed that effective resource sharing required being able to quickly place requested information in the faculty member's or student's hands, regardless of where it was stored, so they started with an assumption that improved delivery of information was as necessary as providing access to information about each library's holdings. They were also determined that the Virtual Library should provide increased and equitable access to more information, and that the total resource base of Virginia should be enriched by the purchase decisions made. Although the project was initially designed for state-supported academic libraries, representatives of private colleges and of the State Library were part of the planning process, and the goal from the first was to design a Virtual Library that could eventually be expanded to serve all the citizens of the Commonwealth. At first this goal will be met by the inclusion of all of the community colleges of Virginia, which provide geographic distribution throughout the state and which are open for use to citizens in their areas. Librarians from private colleges are also serving on committees of the project with the possibility of buying into those portions where such expansion is feasible.

The project has two major components, both of which were funded fully by the General Assembly. They are:

Regional Electronic Resource Centers

The cornerstone of the Virtual Library will be a distributed electronic system to which all libraries will contribute and have access. This system will provide the means for users to find online information from their primary libraries and/or computers, via electronic networks, regardless of the location of the sought material. Regional electronic resource centers in each of the doctoral institutions will maintain and manage segments of the system. The Virtual Library will provide a common system of easy-to-understand menus, a powerful search mechanism, and other design features that users can easily follow as they seek information. To the user the search for information should be seamless.

The focus of most library automation during the past two decades has been on storing and retrieving bibliographic and citation information. Although that information will be a part of the Virtual Library, it is also our intent to provide full-text information in an electronic format. A major challenge in providing this information is including graphic images, numerical databases, sound, and moving images. The six regional resource centers will divide responsibilities among themselves to maximize the development and use of local expertise. One of the major challenges of implementing this project will be deciding how that determination will be made. Traditional resource-sharing models have used a disciplinary division, but in the virtual library there are other reasonable possibilities, including division by type of software needed, sharing of the network load, or distribution by ability to provide reference assistance. The committee to make these recommendations may well come up with other possible scenarios.

All participating colleges and universities in the state will be encouraged to contribute online materials to the Virtual Library, either by providing them electronically to the appropriate electronic resource center or by linking their online resources directly to the system. Thus we have a system of networked resources, using distributed client-server architecture and exploiting the enormous potential of the Virginia Education and Research Network (VERnet) to link libraries and educational institutions together. Because the information is cooperatively acquired and maintained by the regional resource centers and patrons are assured easy access, libraries will no longer need to duplicate holdings of materials.

The Electronic Resource Center's portion of the project includes an education and training component designed to build bridges between the users and the information by training the educators (faculty and librarians) to integrate teaching the use of the virtual library into all aspects of the educational experience.

Enhanced Virginia Academic Library Consortium

Although electronic resources are increasingly available and important to researchers, most information resources are still in traditional printed, microform, and media formats. An integral part of the development of the Virtual Library is a plan to increase access to these resources in a number of ways. Each of these is an extension of the VALC agreements already reached, and each has as its focus the delivery of information to the users of that information. The proposal has three parts:

· Funding for one full-time classified position for each of the doctoral libraries, which provide the overwhelming majority of interlibrary loans to libraries throughout the state.

Interlibrary loan activity has increased rapidly as more bibliographic information has been available, and interlibrary loan departments are frequently unable to respond to the high volume of requests received. The agreement by VALC libraries to respond within 24/48 hours has put additional pressure on lending libraries, which has resulted in reallocation of positions in the libraries and higher costs for filling loans. In many cases VALC libraries have been unable to respond to loans from any other libraries outside the VALC agreement, thereby depriving public, school, and special libraries of valuable resources. Additional full-time staff should help alleviate this problem.

· Provision of scholars' workstations in all participating libraries.

Commercially available software and hardware which allows libraries to use Internet connections to send articles electronically are being used in several of the libraries. This system saves on long-distance charges and delivers a better-quality image which can be further stored and transmitted electronically. The project will provide workstations with the appropriate software to all VALC libraries, thereby improving the speed and quality of document transmission.

· Interfaces to connect the online catalogs.

The project provides funding for the purchase of Z39.50 interfaces for all the libraries' library systems so that patrons at each library will be able to search the systems of all other libraries without having to learn different search strategies for every system. This expands the information available in the online catalog from simply bibliographic information to information about holdings, location, and status, thereby enabling a patron to more precisely identify where the needed material is and if it is available. By reducing the number of requests that cannot be filled, this capability should help lower the high costs of filling interlibrary loan requests and allow lenders to process a greater number of requests.

· Patron-Initiated Interlibrary Loan.

Once the online catalogs of Virginia's academic libraries are linked using the Z39.50 front-end, it becomes possible to implement a software feature to allow library users, rather than library staff, to place interlibrary loan requests. Even if those requests are reviewed by library staff (which seems likely with the current systems available) the bibliographic citation will be generated by the correct online record and the patron information will be entered by the patron, with verification by the system. This development promises substantial savings for libraries and much more efficient and effective retrieval of information for library users.

Budget

The budget of $5.2 million is divided among the various components of the project in the following way:

· $500,000 for 1994-95 for the purchase or creation of electronic collections

· $1,500,000 for 1995-96 for electronic collections

· $225,700 for 94-95 for equipment for resource centers, plus $33,800 in 95-96 for maintenance costs

· $193,800 in 94-95 for workstations in all 51 libraries for access to electronic materials, plus $29,000 for maintenance in 95-96

· $32,000 in 94-95 and $13,000 in 95-96 for training in the use of electronic collections

· $123,400 for both years for staffing support for the six doctoral libraries for expediting interlibrary loan

· $2,108,900 for software and hardware for Z39.50 and patron ILL in 94-95 and $316,300 for maintenance in 95-96

· $21,800 in 94-95 and $16,800 in 95-96 for resource sharing training.

Viewed another way, the budget is divided among the two components of the project as follows:

· $2,527,400 for Electronic Resource Centers

· $2,710,700 for VALC enhancement.

In order to organize this enormous effort in cooperation, the libraries have been meeting regularly since the initiative was approved. In addition, a meeting was held at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville on April 25, 1994, to present the project to the academic librarians of Virginia. The keynote speech was delivered by John Casteen, President of the University of Virginia, who said, "The virtual library initiative is based on the notion that Virginia's academic libraries, by acting cooperatively, can provide access to electronic information and services in cost-effective ways that simply could not be achieved if each college or university acted independently." (2) The general outline of the project was presented by Charlene Hurt as chair of the SCHEV Subcommittee on Networking, and then the attendees broke up into four groups to discuss a series of questions related to the implementation of the project.

Following the meeting on April 25^th an ad-hoc steering committee was formed, consisting of the members of the Subcommittee on Networking (with representatives from all types of academic libraries) and the remaining directors of the doctoral institutions. This steering committee met every other week to prepare for a June 9^th meeting in Williamsburg of all members of the Library Advisory Council to discuss the Virtual Library initiative. The group decided to jointly fund the services of a library consultant to help facilitate the meeting and provide a national perspective on the project. As a result, Howard Harris of RMG was invited to assist us in a morning planning meeting and in the afternoon general session.

At the end of the day the group had agreed on an organizational structure for the Virtual Library project and agreed to nominate librarians to serve on each committee, which will be chaired by a member of the Steering Committee. The SCHEV Library Advisory Council also agreed to name Kathy Perry of George Mason University to coordinate the project on a state-wide basis, and to distribute announcements of the project to librarians and library media as soon as possible. The organization structure begins with the SCHEV Library Advisory Committee, which serves as the oversight committee for the project and will receive quarterly reports from the Steering Committee. The Steering Committee consists of Charlene Hurt, Chair, George Mason University; Barbara Ford, Virginia Commonwealth University; Joanne Eustis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Jean Major, Old Dominion University; Nancy Marshall, College of William and Mary; Carol Pfeiffer, University of Virginia; Wendell Barbour, Christopher Newport University; Dennis Robison, James Madison University; Theresa Byrd, J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College; Lew Terpstra, Virginia Community College System; John Jaffee, Sweet Briar College. Other committees and their chairs are: Technical Issues, Charles Litchfield, VPI; Interlibrary Loan Enhancements, Dennis Robison, JMU; Selecting Electronic Collections, Carol Pfeiffer, UVA; and User Services, Wendell Barbour, CNU.

The assumption is that there may be additional or different committees needed in the future, and that membership may change over time as needs develop.

The success of this legislative initiative can be attributed to several essential ingredients: the strong support of the State Council of Higher Education, the willingness of different libraries to fund pilot projects that provided us with a base of experience, the consistent involvement of the directors of the libraries in the design of the project, and the high degree of mutual trust that these directors were able to develop. All of these ingredients will need to continue to be in place as the first phase of the project is implemented. The Steering Committee members are determined to be thoughtful about issues of representation and equity as they develop the project, and to build a Virtual Library that will provide a firm foundation for all citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Notes

Virginia Academic Library Consortium. Interinstitutional Agreement, 1992, p. 2.
John Casteen, speech to meeting on The Virtual Library of the Commonwealth in Charlottesville on 25 April 1994.