The Library administration has fiscal responsibility for all the libraries in the Library system, including budget development, resource allocation, monitoring of revenues and expenditures, and financial reporting.15 Fiscal management is divided into four separate areas, reflecting the academic and fiscal units of the College: Arts and Sciences, the Medical School, the Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business Administration.
In Fiscal Year 1999 (ended 30 June 1999), the total expenses of the Dartmouth College Library system were $14,341,610 comprising:
50% compensation
40% information resources
10% other operating expenses (not including building maintenance).
Funding for these expenses comprises:
74% College subvention
16% endowment income
10% miscellaneous (gifts, reserve funds, and outside revenue).
Fundraising efforts for the Library are handled by teams within the College’s and professional schools’ development offices, although various Library administrators and staff may become involved in negotiating and establishing new gifts and endowments. The Library does not have a development officer.
The library system is composed of twelve separate units with a combined net assignable square footage of 243,746. 16 The Collections Services departments and the Library administration are located within Baker Library. One of the greatest strengths of most libraries at Dartmouth is their physical proximity to related academic departments. In addition, some of the libraries have distinguished architecture which is highly prized by students, faculty, and alumni. Facilities weaknesses include inadequate stack space, lack of climate control in many libraries, insufficient study space, poorly designed staff workspace and challenges to installing information technology. As of July 1999, physical specifications for the facilities as a whole are as follows:
Major planned facilities include the new Berry Library, which will expand Baker Library by approximately 80,000 assignable square feet, and a new mathematics and computer science library as part of the proposed Kemeny Hall project. A formal proposal for a new or expanded Storage Library is currently under consideration. 17
The single largest equipment challenge is maintaining adequate computing power on staff and user desktops. Computing and other technologies are advancing rapidly, thus introducing pressures to update equipment more frequently than in the past. The Library has attempted to regularly review equipment and to replace part of the inventory on an annual basis. Older models are recycled for other appropriate uses to extend their useful life spans. The replacement cycle, however, lags in relation to user and staff needs.
A number of special programs are managed by the Library:
The Library maintains connections to other institutions through a number of formal and informal memberships and consortial arrangements.
As a charter member of the Association of Research Libraries, the Library has benefited from participation in the wide diversity of workshops, professional programs, and membership activities offered by that organization. The Library has participated in self-study processes focused on preservation and on public services, organized by the ARL’s Office of Leadership and Management Studies. The Library has been a member of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since its founding, and most recently, has joined the membership of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an organization founded in response to the high and escalating costs of commercial scholarly publications.
An early adopter of information technology, the Library joined the OCLC organization in 1971, and subsequently joined the OCLC—network affiliate, NELINET. The Library is a charter member of the Research Libraries Group, which it joined in 1979. Membership in these two organizations has allowed the Library to improve user access to resources held both nationally and internationally while simultaneously improving efficiencies in processing its own collections. As a member of RLG, the Library participates in the resource sharing program SHARES and is a member of the preservation program PRESERV. The RLG Conspectus program was used as the basis for developing collection policy statements for the Library, and a variety of conspectus verification studies have been done. The RLIN database, developed by RLG, was instrumental in allowing the Library to develop its BRS-based online catalog in the 1980s. More recently, the Library has been involved in Beta testing a number of new products for RLG including the Ariel workstation for transmitting documents digitally via the Internet, and is currently a test site for the ILL Resource Management software. Over the years, Library staff have participated in a wide variety of planning groups and committees.
Dartmouth College is a member of the New Hampshire Consortium of Universities and Colleges. Though there is little formal commitment required of the Library, staff participate in regular meetings with colleagues in other libraries in the consortium.
More recently the Library has joined a number of informal consortial arrangements. As a founding member of the Northeast Research Libraries Group (NERL), the Library has been in the forefront of negotiating reasonable licenses for digital information. This has had a direct impact on the expansion of resources for the Library’s users. The Library is also a founding member of JSTOR, an innovative program designed to digitize archival runs of important scholarly journals in a wide range of subject areas.
Next section:
"The Dartmouth College Library in the Year 2000"