The Library’s reputation as a service organization is well known at Dartmouth. The Library has been praised in numerous written reports and has consistently received high marks from faculty and students for the quality of service provided to the Dartmouth community. Individual and customized services are the norm throughout the library system, with a growing emphasis on the creation of user-initiated services. Recent College administrations have made faculty research a priority for the institution, and have promoted greater involvement for undergraduates in research activities. New faculty interdisciplinary research centers and programs, such as the Center for Molecular Materials and Mathematics Across the Curriculum, are being launched or are in development. Concurrently, recent revisions and changes in the curriculum have resulted in greater emphasis on interdisciplinary course requirements. The effect of these trends on the Library has been noticeably greater demands on and expectations for library resources and services.
The User Services departments accomplish the Library’s mission in three ways: by providing access to information held within the library collection; by managing gateways to information available from other sources; and by educating library users in identifying and managing information. User services include:
This area includes "transaction-based" services such as circulation and document delivery. Links from the library network allow patrons to view their circulation records, request that items be retrieved from the Storage Library, and view course reserve lists. Renewals and holds can be placed through electronic mail. An experiment with electronic reserves has begun in the Biomedical Libraries. Circulation and reserve use has held fairly constant, except in those libraries where a strong move towards electronic resources has had an impact on the use of the print collections.
With few other large academic library collections nearby, interlibrary loan plays a vital role in fulfilling the information needs of faculty, students, and researchers at Dartmouth. Interlibrary loan reflects the distributed user service model, with departments located in most of the libraries on campus. Most of these departments rely on RLIN (the Research Libraries Information Network of the Research Libraries Group, Inc. [RLG]) and OCLC (originally the Ohio College Library Center, now OCLC, Inc.) for a major portion of their transactions, although there is increasing use of the Internet for direct communication and access to foreign library collections. The distributed arrangement supports the development of expertise in obtaining materials for the various units' targeted clientele. DOCLINE, for instance, is used heavily by the Biomedical Libraries; the use of commercial document delivery providers is of greater importance to the Feldberg and Kresge libraries. Membership in the RLG SHARES program gives faculty priority access to major research collections, both domestically and in the United Kingdom and Europe.
The Library has seen a steady increase over the last 10 years in the number of interlibrary loan transactions, with a growth of 35% during that period. A recent Association of Research Libraries (ARL) study shows that Dartmouth runs a very efficient interlibrary loan operation, with an average lending turnaround time of 10 days and a mean cost of 23% below other research libraries in the study. Ninety-eight percent of requests for Dartmouth users are sent within 24 hours and the fill rate for our users is 96%. The Library is exploring new software packages that will streamline processes and move interlibrary loan to a paperless operation.
Additionally, the growth of interdisciplinary programs at Dartmouth places a growing demand on the document delivery service that operates among the various units. Using a Web form, faculty may request materials to be delivered to their primary library location. Some of the libraries also offer photocopy services for materials within their own collections.
Each library provides educational activities focused on its specific user populations. Incoming faculty, and graduate and undergraduate students are targeted for general introductions to the Library’s collections and services. More specialized instruction on information resources occurs in a variety of library settings (one-on-one, small-group, and full classes) and may be integrated into instruction in the curriculum. Some libraries (notably the Biomedical Libraries) have quite well developed education programs. The preparation of guides, handouts, and other documentation is ongoing, and new forms of outreach, such as Library Web pages, are being developed to deliver and reinforce these educational efforts. Educating users about digital resources has been hampered by lack of appropriate instructional space, a situation partially being addressed with the Berry Library project.
Traditional reference service is provided at reference desks and over the telephone; an electronic reference service has operated since 1994. Many librarians providing these services are reference-bibliographers with collection management responsibilities; all are research experts in their subject areas. Librarians are assigned formal liaison responsibilities to departments, centers, and programs, and may work with researchers to retrieve and interpret information. Library staff may work on extended projects for faculty who are writing books, review articles or otherwise engaged in intensive research projects. A growing demand from users for librarians to provide assistance in manipulating data creates a challenge to staff in terms of expertise and time commitments.
Dartmouth College has been a leader in the development and universal availability of computing and networking, which has positioned the Library to be an early adopter of most electronic services. This has enabled the Library to expand continuously the scope of user services facilitated by computing equipment. The development of electronic services has gradually evolved through several stages. The first systems, such as the online catalog and other indexes and abstracts, provided information about content. The next stage provided networked editions of fundamental sources, such as digital reference materials and full texts of canonical works. This was followed by transaction services like circulation information or document delivery requests. Presently rapid growth is occurring in collections of digital primary sources including journals and monographs, with the Web becoming the preferred medium for delivery. The computers and networks have enabled easier patron self-service and expanded the availability of library materials and services. This digital framework is significantly altering the use and operation of the library.
The libraries in the system, representing varying clienteles and disciplines, have different emphases in programs and offer a broad range of services tailored to the needs of their respective users. As the Library is a decentralized system, the User Services Committee acts as a vehicle to coordinate user service activities, and has reporting to it Reference, Interlibrary Loan, and Circulation roundtables comprised of the staff who manage and work in these operations throughout the system.
The public service units are distributed in the following libraries, which together comprise the Dartmouth College Library:
Promoting and publicizing information resources and services is an on-going responsibility distributed among the library staff. With no library-wide or central position charged with this responsibility, promotion and publicity are managed by standing committees, such as the Reference Services Roundtable and the Collection Management and Development Committee, and ad hoc working groups, such as the Ovid Implementation Team. Means of communication vary with the service or resource and with the intended audience. Printed flyers, brochures, newsletters, e-mail, print and electronic bulletin boards, Web pages and personal communication are all utilized as publicity methods. Print products range from the formal series of "Green Guides" for a general audience to flyers advertising a particular database customized for the faculty and graduate students in a department or school. The library sponsors several newsgroups for the purpose of reaching large audiences and regularly publishes in the College newspaper VOX. The Library maintains a strong Web presence, with each department within the system supporting Web pages that list resources, services, and contact information. Librarians act as liaisons to specific academic and administrative departments, in part to ensure that students and faculty are aware of relevant resources and services.
Comments and suggestions from the Dartmouth community regarding library collections, services, and facilities are highly valued by the library staff. There are opportunities for feedback from library users at every service point, and through e-mail. Suggestions often result in changes in services or additions to the collection. The library liaisons to departments engage in on-going discussions with the faculty and graduate students about collections and services, and invite feedback in person or via e-mail. Library department heads and liaisons meet formally with academic department chairs to discover their major concerns and new directions within the departments. While most user feedback is anecdotal or received informally, occasionally more formal and organized methods such as focus groups and surveys are used to gather input from the whole community. The most recent example of a planned initiative is the Web-based user survey scheduled for the spring of 2000, which will gather user feedback regarding the Library’s services, collections, and facilities. 4
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"The Dartmouth College Library in the Year 2000"