Cornell University Library
Annual Report 1998-1999
Objectives for 1999-2000
Highlights of the past year
goal 1: Provide outstanding service to the university in support of Cornell's information needs by integrating traditional and digital resources and services.
The Cornell Institute for Digital Collections (CIDC) partnered with the Johnson Museum in the Museum Online Project, a complex undertaking to capture digital images of a broad selection of the Museum's 27,000 objects and to make them accessible for teaching and research in the Cornell community. The project has served as a model for other organizations engaged in digitization of visual images, and CIDC staff have conducted numerous workshops and panel discussions on their experiences. CIDC has also worked on a planning study for a collaborative effort with the Frick Art Reference Library to digitize photographs and create an interface informed by discussions with scholars. In June, CIDC completed an agreement to assist in the editing of the prestigious electronic journal D-Lib, in co-operation with D-Lib editor William Arms, who joined Computer Science in May.
MyLibrary is a set of new personalized electronic services that is being developed by a working group of staff from across the Library system. Two services will be offered initially, beginning later in the fall semester. One will be a current awareness service, which will notify individual students and faculty of newly acquired books, journals, electronic media and other resources of special subject interest. The second service will take the form of a personalized workspace on a Library server that individual faculty and students will be able to use to maintain links to networked resources of special interest. Once these two initial services are established, others will be developed.
ILLiad. The Library has been working closely with the producers of a commercial software system, ILLiad, which is intended to streamline and enhance the interlibrary loan process. This new software, which will be loaded in the course of the fall semester, will not only make the work of borrowing and lending materials much more efficient for library staff, but will also allow users to keep track of their ILL requests online, and to observe the progress in fulfilling those requests. The majority of ILL users in future will likely submit their ILL requests online.
Exhibitions,
Lectures, Symposia, and Tours
Several well-attended exhibitions and lectures are examples of the Library's
outreach program and its linkage to the intellectual life of the campus.
Among the many events were the Nabokov Centennial Exhibit, in which several
significant donated additions to the Library's collection were featured;
the Laura (Riding) Jackson exhibit; the Maeda symposium and exhibit celebrating
the acquisition of the prized private collection of the noted Japanese
literary scholar and critic Maeda Ai; and the Beautiful Birds exhibit
showcasing masterpieces from the Hill Ornithology Collection. Beautiful
Birds is augmented by a web
site (http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/ornithology/) produced in collaboration
with the Lab of Ornithology which includes the bibliographic records of
the books in the Hill Collection and links to bird songs, Bird Source,
an interactive Website for birders, and the Library's Louis Agassiz Fuertes
database.
The Library, the Department of Computer Science, the Interactive Multimedia Group, and the Department of Astronomy co-sponsored a series of lectures in information science, bringing speakers from Harvard, the University of Maryland, the California Digital Library, the Coalition for Networked Information, and Xerox PARC to campus.
Mann Library received notable press coverage and thousands of virtual visits following the announcement of its Virtual Tour, (www.mannlib.cornell.edu/tour.html/) an online guided tour of Mann Library's building which highlights its campaign themes of acquisitions, preservation, and innovation.
