Scholarly Communications and Special Collections Annual Report for 1996/97

Both units of this department focused on improving user access to unique materials or publications otherwise only available in paper. This lead not only to increased interaction with external library users, but also to better access for the library’s walk-in clients. Special Collections accessioned, processed, and prepared guides to collections; participated in collection development for the rare book, reference, and manuscript/archival collections; staffed the Reference Desk and answered questions from telephone, fax, mail, and e-mail; created and maintained, edited and made significant changes to the guides to special collections and contributed to new digital image resources, moving the prototype ImageBase to a production-scale resource for worldwide, networked access; created exhibitions of unique library resources to inform and attract users; and preserved the rare book, manuscript and archival collections for the future.

The Scholarly Communications Project’s growing national reputation led to new scholarly online publications and formalization of experimental procedures such as digitizing and identifying images and archiving electronic theses and dissertations. ETD processing was scaled up, resulting in approximately 200 new titles being network-accessible in 1996/97. Eight new journal editors contact SCP during this reporting period, resulting in the online publication of four new journals, with at least two nearly ready for publication.