Thursday, April 20, 2023
The Library hosted a Town Hall on March 28 to share updates and projects that reflect progress towards our 2020-2025 strategic plan. James Rush, vice-president, academic & provost and Charmaine Dean, vice-president, research and international opened with remarks on the place of the Library within the campus community followed by Beth Namachchivaya, university librarian, who shared stories and activities included in the Library’s 2022 Annual Report and answered questions from the audience.
Keep reading for responses to the questions the campus community had for the Library:
How has past feedback, for example from previous town halls or forums, informed how the Library has changed?
The Library absorbs and gets feedback from many different places on a daily basis, both formally and informally: We held our last Town Hall in winter 2021; the university librarian is a member of the University Senate and many other library staff are members of committees across campus; our librarians regularly attend faculty departmental meetings and interact with individual faculty and students; and our circulation staff are interacting with patrons in our spaces daily. The feedback and information gathered in these spaces and conversations inform how we shape our programs and services. The Library operates a very active user experience program so that we are able to examine the questions and feedback that come up regularly to systematically improve our programs and services.
The annual report state that approximately 34,000 physical items circulated in 2022. Does that include interlibrary loans?
In addition to the 34,994 physical books circulated from the UWaterloo collections to Waterloo borrowers, information about interlibrary loans in 2022 includes the following:
- 12,557 items borrowed by UWaterloo students and faculty from partner libraries:
- 8,985 physical items
- 3,572 digital items
- 12,509 items lent by our Library to partner libraries:
- 6,861 physical items
- 5,648 digital items
Will there ever come a time when the Library does not contain books and the space reallocated for more student study space or bookable small group meeting space?
Together, the Dana Porter and the Davis Centre libraries support 2,000 study spaces — including a range of options, such as individual and group study tables, carrels, group meeting rooms and bookable rooms. The libraries also provide access to over two million physical volumes and millions more digital resources — journals, books and databases. Library spaces, services and collections are heavily used as an important hub for study, collaboration, informal learning and research. Without a doubt, onsite access to scholarly resources — including physical as well as digital collections — will continue to figure largely in the Library’s services.
If a resource is available both as an e-book book and as a hard copy, how does the Library decide which copy to purchase? Does the Library have a general preference one way or another?
The Library’s key priority is to provide University of Waterloo students, instructors and researchers with access to critical research information that supports curriculum and research programs. Over the past two decades, publishers have transitioned a substantial amount of scholarly information into digital format, based on demand. The Library also shifted into “digital preferred mode” during the pandemic to support remote instruction and research.
Hybrid learning and research have continued with the 2022 return to campus, and the Library has sustained access to digital resources to ensure that our user community has broad access to materials when they need them, from wherever they're located. The decision about whether to purchase an item in print or digital format depends primarily on need and intended use, coupled with the knowledge that not everything is digitally available. Subject librarians work directly with faculty and departments to select resources based on curriculum and research needs.
Looking at the 2022 levels of e-books, e-journals and course reserves, if you were to make a trend diagram of usage across formats, where are things going? Is everything up or are people borrowing fewer physical resources?
Stepping back for a view of the overall picture, there is no simple answer. There is a clear trend toward increased digital use in research libraries over the past decade. However, if you only let your nose follow one set of trend lines, you'd be missing some important points.
For example, we are experiencing is an increase in interlibrary loans across the Omni consortium, the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) — of which we are a member. The Omni digital platform, which replaced the Tri-University Group (TUG) online catalogue in 2019, provides Ontario universities like Waterloo with interlibrary loan access to over 21 million titles. Our patrons can now request a title from another OCUL library with just a click of a button, and it arrives at Waterloo within five business days. The Library is delighted to support this greatly increased access to research information through the OCUL consortium, and indicators show that the Waterloo community is using it.
How does the current licensing of electronic resources impede the Library’s ability to share, or have items shared with us, through interlibrary loan, a core tenant of librarianship?
This is a key question academic libraries are wrestling with. Copyright law in Canada, and any number of other countries, was developed for the print era. It doesn’t readily facilitate sharing or re-use of digital research information, particularly in educational settings. Some of you may be familiar with a recent US court ruling against the Internet Archive for its approach to controlled digital lending of copyrighted digital books during the pandemic.
The situation presents challenges for libraries, which are required to follow Canadian copyright law and the fair dealing exceptions that were developed for the print publication world. Canadian research libraries and universities play an important role in advocating for copyright law revisions to reflect the information access needs of individual scholars in today’s world of education and research.
While there are no straightforward solutions, the Library advocates for policy and legislative change through organizations like the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL).
What are the Library's plans related to access to information and academic resources for online learning?
The Library supports both curriculum and research at Waterloo by providing access to research information, as well as the expertise and services needed to effectively navigate today’s complex information landscape. We work in tandem with the University to support its emerging Digital Learning Strategy and hybrid learning practice to support students, whether they are studying in person or online. The Library also collaborates with partners on campus to ensure a robust collection in a variety of formats — print, e-books, electronic journals and databases — across disciplines. We’ve introduced new services, such as books by mail, to increase access to print materials for scholars who reside in Canada; we’ve made it easier to request digitization and email delivery of book chapters and articles. As the needs of our scholars change, the Library will continue to be agile in our programs and services to support their learning goals.
If you’re interested in learning more about recent library activities, read our 2022 Annual Report.
