The Library in 2006 - from the University Librarian

John Redmayne, University Librarian, has given us an outline of the Library's direction in the coming year -


Budget
The Library has received notice of its capital grant for the year (which pays for our books and journals). In particular, we have been able to increase the book budget across allocations by an average 7%, which should enable us to cope with book publishers’ increases and some movement in the New Zealand dollar. The allocation for electronic databases and e-journals includes an 8% increase for publishers’ prices, and the print (paper) serials (a diminishing portion nowadays of our collections budget) still allows for a 10% increases in publishers’ costs. Of course, there is a certain nervousness about the value of the New Zealand dollar later in the year when we pay our subscription renewals. The budget includes a sum for such a contingency, and the Finance Section of the Registry also purchases forward currency for us (mostly in US dollars these days). We will continue to monitor currency movements carefully during the year, but generally the 2006 capital grant is good news for the Library, and further action will need to be taken only of the dollar drops severely.

Backfiles
At the end of 2005 we took advantage of the strong dollar to make some significant one-off purchases. For science, these included a further backfile for 1945-1969 of the Web of science (Science citation index). One further file is available (1900-1944), and a few libraries have now started to purchase. This is something we may consider in the future, if there is interest and if funding becomes available. We also purchased the archive of the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau Indexes for 1920-1972 (to supplement our electronic file from 1973), so we now have to full set, and the printed indexes can be retired to the closed stack. Elsevier’s ScienceDirect database of full text journal articles covers issues from 1995. Over the past two years we have been buying the archives (back to the first issue of a title) for selective subject areas. In 2004 we bought the subject files for agriculture, biochemistry and molecular biology, and veterinary science. At the end of 2005 we were able to buy further subject backfiles for environmental sciences, mathematics and engineering. We have also purchased BioOne (a collection of 81 biological science titles from society publishers), with the life science developments at Albany particularly in mind, and made a major expansion of our holdings of the Nature research and review journals, so that now we have available (and electronically) all of these journals except the two drug trial titles in the Nature package.

Rodski Survey
In September 2005 the Library participated in the Rodski client satisfaction survey, and thank you to those who completed the online survey form. Rodski is an independent company, and the library survey has been completed by all of the Australian university libraries and 4 of the 8 New Zealand university libraries, so it is very useful for benchmarking, as well as for the individual results. We have over 200 pages of specific comments from Massey library users and we are working our way through these at the moment. The overall result was pleasing, with Rodski placing the library in the first quartile (top 25%) compared with the other libraries on their database. The greatest gap differential between expectation and performance was for library facilities and equipment. But in service quality, service delivery and library staff Massey ranked as well in the top 5 for the 15 Australasian university libraries who completed the survey in 2005.



Digital repository trial
In 2006, the Library will be trialling the ProQuest Digital Commons software, with some pilot projects for both digital theses and research papers, and making these available on the web. Three other New Zealand university libraries will also be trialling this software. This is the precursor to the eventual establishment of an institutional repository, which is a much larger project, and for which Massey is an international partner in the RUBRIC project with a number of Australian universities, and with Gerrit Bahlman, our ITS Director, as a Board member.



John Redmayne

University Librarian.

New Zealand Veterinary Journal Makes an Immediate Impact

We have just learnt that the New Zealand Veterinary Journal has topped the Immediacy Index rankings for veterinary science journals in the latest Journal Citation Reports. The Immediacy Index counts the number of times articles from a journal are cited in the year in which they are published and is usually seen as a measure of both the topical relevance of a journal and of the extent of its readership within the relevant scientific community. The immediacy index of 0.78 means that on average 78% of NZVJ articles are cited in the year of publication. The immediacy index for all journals in the veterinary science category is 0.16.

As well as having high immediacy NZVJ also has a long Cited Half-Life - half the articles cited in 2004 were more than ten years old - which suggests that over its lifetime it has published a considerable body of research of long-term relevance.

Do Academic Libraries Have a Future?

Will the traditional university library simply wither away after the ICT revolution or will it evolve from a lumbering print dinosaur to a nimble electronic bird? And do we really care? If you do, the latest issue of Educause Review contains an article by Jerry D. Campbell called "Changing a Cultural Icon: The Academic Library as a Virtual Destination" which is an excellent summary of current issues and trends.

Major New Source - ISI Proceedings

Conference papers are an important channel of academic communication but they can be frustratingly difficult to find! From the beginning of 2006 Massey Library is able to offer access to the ISI Proceedings database which is part of the ISI Web of Knowledge suite. ISI Proceedings covers conference papers published in journals and book series as well separately published proceedings.

It is searched using exactly the same protocols as Web of Science, CAB Abstracts and Current Contents. A really useful feature is the ability to search by Conference details so that if you remember that a conference on mechatronics was held in Boston you simply enter mechatronics and boston into the Conference field to see a list of papers.

As with other Web of Knowledge databases you can link to the Massey Library catalogue by clicking on the Holdings button of an individual record. If the record does not have a Holdings button it is worth searching the Library catalogue separately - a keyword search using a number of words from the conference name and its location is a really effective way of doing this.

Pictures That Lie!

A recent article in the Boston Globe with the title Techology seen abbetting manipulation of research reports that 1% of articles submitted to the Journal of Cell Biology contained images that had been manipulated to a degree that amounted to deliberate falsification. Fortunately the same technology that allows the fiddling to be done is also useful in detecting it.

Finding Journals in the Library

Happy New Year!

Life was simpler in the days when all of the Library's journals were shelved in one big sequence of printed volumes on the ground floor. Even if you were the sort of person who didn't like using catalogues you could see what was there and after a little time you got to know the holdings in your area pretty well. The advent of electronic access to journals has enormously increased our scientific journal holdings but at the cost of this simplicity. Electronic journals are usually part of a large publisher's package like Elesvier ScienceDirect or Blackwell Science, but they can also be embedded in "aggregator databases" like EBSCOhost and InfoTrac or they can be "one-offs" provided directly by small publishers. Sometimes we have access to the same journal through a number of these channels and the situation becomes complicated by the fact that the aggregators offer restricted access only to many of their titles, so that for example the last twelve months' issues will not be available.

If you want to know whether you have access through the Library to a journal the simplest and quickest method is to do a journal search on the catalogue. If it is not listed then it is highly unlikely that we hold it and it is not necessary to search individually through our databases. Our policy is to include all instances where we have access to a journal in order to be able to fully exploit our spending and to ensure that if we lose access through one channel that the journal is still available to you through another. Sometimes this means that you will have to examine the record quite closely to ensure that the electronic link you are following will give you the year and volume you are after -

Only in a very small number of cases are there journal titles available through the Library's subscriptions that are not listed as such on the catalogue - this is usually because of time delays in entering new packages. By all means get in touch with us if you think we should have access to a title that is not listed.