Cornell University Library
Annual Report 1998-1999
Objectives for 1999-2000

Highlights of the past year

goal 2: Build and preserve the collections required of a major university according to a rational collection policy.

Acquisitions The Library added over 200,000 volumes during FY 98/99, with a materials budget totaling $11 million. New acquisitions ranged from a copy of William Wordsworth's Poetical Works, with annotations in his hand, to licenses to a number of full-text databases and online journals. The Library is devoting approximately 9% of its materials budget to electronic resources. Demand for access to electronic materials continues to rise, but these expenditures compete with print titles, both monographs and serials, which are considered essential by faculty and staff.

North East Regional Library (NERL) Consortium The Cornell University Library participates with seventeen other universities in jointly evaluating and negotiating subscriptions to electronic resources. Through its participation it has saved at least $75,000 in the past year and had the benefit of the collective experience of collection development experts from multiple institutions.

Preservation The Library was awarded several competitive grants to preserve distinguished collections. A substantial grant was received from the National Endowment for the Humanities to microfilm and catalog materials from the world renowned Dante/Petrarch collection, which was begun by Willard Fiske. The Library also received a large grant--the largest received by any library--from the Saving AmericaÕs Treasures project of the Department of the Interior; this funding will be used to conserve, catalog and digitize some 10,000 pamphlets from the LibraryÕs antislavery collection.

Research into the service implications of electronic information and into the Library’s ability to ensure reliable access to electronic information over time were also funded by a variety of external agencies, including the National Historic Publications and Records Commission, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Council on Library and Information Resources. These projects are all aimed at the study and resolution of some of the key issues in digital library development today. Such funded research, combined with the work that will be done as part of the above mentioned NSF Digital Library Initiative, places the Library in a position of national leadership in the area of digital archiving.

Cornell Primary Collecting Responsibilities. In order to manage and coordinate more effectively the building of library collections throughout the Cornell Library system, primary responsibilities for selecting on all subjects have been assigned to staff in individual libraries. This system will not prevent any library from collecting materials on any subject, but it defines for the first time which library selectors have primary responsibility for specific subjects.