QUESTION: LibraryA1

The online information resources are excellent, but it might be helpful to have more books available ... particularly at the Centers. It would be helpful to have Business History collections and some other reference books.

The library has or has access to most of the materials needed by professors.  When requests have involved materials housed at other locations, it has never taken more than a couple of days to get the materials.

The program’s requirements for library resources are for a good general ethnographic collection, current and historical literature in all fields of anthropology, and good access to the major journals in all sub-fields of anthropology.  Most of these needs are fairly well met through the database subscriptions, and a process of sending new publications notices to the department for advice about prioritizing acquisitions.  The Web of Science subscribed to by the Library does not include the Social Sciences Citation Index, which would be a useful resource.

The library, library faculty, and secure, regular funding for collection development are vital to the College of Arts and Humanities.  Library resources must be kept current and easily accessible for any work in the visual arts to be measured and evaluated against similar achievement in the larger world.

General Requirements:

     · Professors and students access the CWU collection On CATTRAX from their offices.

     · All library staff are to be congratulated on their efforts to help our students conduct research, the acquisition and maintenance of various databases and the frequent purchases of art-related texts that are made through the Friends of the Library.  The Brooks Library plays an essential part in the research of our students and faculty.

Current library resources include approximately 300 books and 1400 journal articles on subjects related to aviation and aeronautics, and another 60 resources in aerospace (mostly engineering).  Only four references to aviation psychology are available as links to journals and proceedings.
  
The CWU library holds subscriptions to the following journals; Airline Pilot; Air & Space Power Journal; Air Transport World; Aviation for Women; Aviation Week and Space Technology; Aviation Safety; Avionics News; Flight Training; Flying; IFR: International Journal of Aviation Psychology; Journal of Air Traffic Control; Journal of Aviation; NTSB Reporter; SafetyLiner; Journal of Aerospace Education and Research; and, Professional Pilot.  	

The biology department relies on the library for access to journals, books, reference materials, maps, and as a repository for reserve material. The Biology department makes extensive use of interlibrary loan services, and databases such as the Web of Science. The library provides us with several thousands of dollars of journal subscriptions and a book budget of approximately $5,500/year. The library is a vital source of information for our graduate students as they develop thesis projects, and is essential for undergraduate students involved in undergraduate research and class projects. 

The CWU Library represents an important piece in the success of the Chemistry Department’s educational and research objectives.  One of the department’s program goals relates to information literacy, i.e., students must be able to retrieve and critically analyze chemical literature.  The department holds American Chemical Society (ACS) certification of our B.S. program.  The ACS requires that (1) Chemical Abstracts must be available, either in print or electronically.  Electronic access is currently available after 5 pm;  (2) the library must provide ready access to at least 20 refereed journals, in print or electronically.  With the library’s ACS publications subscription and current print holdings this requirement is satisfied.

The following library services are critical support to chemistry programs:

1. Interlibrary loan office
2. Journal holdings in Chemistry
3. Shared non-journal library collections with Oregon and Washington (Summit)
4. Online database access (Web of Science, etc.)

The Communication Department has specific requirements for library resources. Most of those resources are marginally satisfied through the combined resources of the departmental library and the university library. Students in every major require access to books, periodicals, and the online database provided by the university library. 

The present library resources provide basic reference materials, but many are out of date. The department library has some useful books, journals aid other resources, but they are also in need of updating. There is a definite need for more current literature in every area of the communication discipline. Faculty have specifically requested more specialized books, software and reference books for both the university library and in the department. Communication is a social science based discipline and all forms of research are performed by both students and faculty. The need for this information and technology resources to be up to date are crucial to optimizing the potential of the department. 

January, 2008
It is interesting, but not surprising, that most of the new research in computer science is kept in digital libraries.  The library holdings, including digital subscriptions, are listed in our program review.  As can be seen by the list of holdings, access to these journals is electronic.  Of most interest to the students and faculty are the digital libraries kept by the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society.  In addition to the library holdings, faculty subscriptions, supported by the department,  give access to those electronic journals not held by the library. It is the opinion of the department that student/faculty research projects have the necessary access to current research.

The DOE relies on the library of Central Washington University for books, journals, and government documents needed to support teaching and research. Interlibrary loan is another source of information for economics faculty and students. Each year, the library provides the DOE $3,485 for the purchase of books and $1,023 for subscriptions to journals. 

Our library facility is an excellent one for an undergraduate program in economics. The faculty has reported that the library is very prompt in ordering materials that are needed for courses in economics. The DOE is a significant user of the reserve section of the library for courses and is a consistent user of materials throughout the library. 

Research material is housed in the Brooks Library.  Many of the holdings/resources specific to education are outdated.  In the last few years, there has been input and more recent resources have become available.  This pattern of acquiring recent and recommended materials must continue. The DOE Library Representative has provided opportunities for faculty input to suggest new holdings as they become available.  Often times, for research purposes, student’s must utilize other sources such as SUMMIT because adequate recent resources on the topics are just not available at the CWU library.

Brooks library has very adequate online resources to electronic data-bases which represent best practice journals in special education.  Continuing access to the full spectrum of journals is necessary for our students to have access to current evidence-based practices in education. 

Curricular materials, necessary to support prospective educators, such as textbooks, instructional manipulatives, kits and games, curricular and educational assessments, and educator curricular resource books are housed within the Curriculum Library at the Educational Technology Center housed in Black Hall.  Because of the lack of a budget to obtain materials and adequately develop the curriculum libary, this collection is not comprehensive, is very dated and not reflective or supportive of best-practices for students soon to be teachers in the field.  The collection is dependent on donations and faculty who are able to write publishers to obtain donations.   Current materials supporting statewide education curriculum, such as a comprehensive library of  recent recommended curricular materials supporting evidenced-based practices across all core curriculum served by the DOE and that supports the unique learning of all students is necessary.  An adequate budget, faculty input and stewardship, and adequate resources such as staff to catalog newly acquired materials within a timely manner would benefit students both undergraduate, graduate and faculty. 

The library is essential to the work of literature and language disciplines. It is to the humanities what the lab is to the sciences. Library resources must be kept current and materials must be accessible for our work to be of significance to the larger world.

We have a department library liason and faculty review potential purchases on a regular basis.  There is a good collection of online and print journals.  The online MLA database is an essential resource for students and faculty, and the addition of the online Essay and General Literature Index has been helpful.  Library staff have been a valuable resource in assisting students in our composition courses on research projects.

FCS Education
There are two specific journals requested for Family and Consumer Sciences Education at the library.  They are:  The Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences and The Research Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences.  Both journals are used for research by FCSE students.  All students are required to complete assignments that support the use of these and other journals that pertain to issues of the family and/or the consumer.    Students are expected to be able to read, critique, and use referred journals in all courses.  Specific assignments require that students understand reliable resources, how to find them on-line, and how to reference them appropriately.

Family Studies
Reasonable library resources are available to students and faculty for family studies related topics.  Access to other libraries through SUMMUT and ILLiad as well as online databases in family studies, education, sociology, psychology, etc.  provide additional resources for our students.  More current resources could be added in the area of sexuality education and parenting education.

Fashion Merchandising
The new faculty member has not assessed the library resources for FM.  The faculty member came from industry and brought industry resources to CWU.

Recreation and Tourism
The CWU library has limited physical resources for the RT discipline on campus.  With access through Interlibrary Loan, Summit Catalog, and other on line resources, the scope of library resources increases.  One thing that is very critical is the fact that the CWU library does not carry any RT academic journals such as JPRA.

Interior Design
The ID program relies heavily on industry resources to meet its education and research objective.

Our students have access to library facilities at all campuses.  The off campus centers have their own libraries as well as access to collections in Ellensburg.  The off campus centers are located at community colleges and have access to their libraries.  Students at all campuses have access to computer labs and online sources of information.

In addition to materials on the shelves in both reference and general holdings, the library provides media support in the form of a fairly extensive video and DVD collection in both English and other languages. The Media Circulation section of the library has also supplied much of the equipment (video projectors, VCRs, DVD players, etc.) that is necessary to project the audio-visual media forms. The periodicals section has language specific newspapers, magazines or journals in all of our spoken languages. 

Because of geography’s synthesizing mode and method, department faculty often require access to current literature from many disciplinary sources.  Both faculty and student needs are generally met as a result of the university’s increasing support of and subscription to varied databases (e.g., GeoBase, GeoRef, Web of Science) and full text electronic journal and newspaper collections (e.g., JSTOR, ProQuest), as well as full access to rapid interlibrary loans through the SUMMIT regional libraries catalog system.  Material not available through SUMMIT can generally be obtained through the ILLiad on-line interlibrary loan request system, although that takes longer and has user fees associated with it.  All of these sources are readily available through university computers as well as from off-campus through the university’s internet web page.  The CWU library also maintains an extensive map library and government documents depository, as well as helpful links to additional electronic data sources through its website.

STANDARD 5 UPDATED FEBRUARY, 2008
The library does an excellent job with the resources it is given. Department faculty, staff and students routinely use Georef, GEOBASE and the many engines that access on-line journals (e.g., Science Direct Journals, SpringerLink).  Routine use is made of all of the avenues through which on-line journals are acquired. The Interlibrary loan office does an impressive job of filling requests in a timely way. Cattrax and Summit are also excellent resources. The current library repository of US Geological Survey and other documents is satisfactory.  

The main challenge is the library’s inability to maintain a number of on-line and/or print journal subscriptions that are necessary to our teaching and research programs.  While interlibrary loan is a substitute for having direct access to journals and other resources, the time lag, in some cases, presents difficulties. This is particularly true because the time available to do research at CWU can be quite fragmented. If a particular article is not available when a faculty member has an open window of time, progress comes to a halt, and in some cases, cannot be reinitiated for several weeks.  

Additional journals, not currently fully available except by interlibrary loan or by waiting for a period of time (e.g., 6-months following publication), that would enhance our program: 

Journal of Petrology 
Journal of Hydrology 
Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology 
Earth and Planetary Science Letters 
Geoderma 
Quaternary Science Reviews 

Budget cuts have severely diminished acquisition of journals, books, reference materials, maps, and microfilmed collections of newspapers and primary collections in the last decade.  The History Department’s faculty commend library efforts to facilitate research under these circumstances -- particularly the special efforts of many library staff people; participation in the SUMMIT system; the growth of Inter-library Loan services; the acquisition of computerized databases that provide scholarly journal articles and primary sources; supplementary materials acquired by Friends of the Library; President McIntyre’s call for the collection of historical materials relating to CWU’s past; and campus cooperation with the State Archives Central Branch at the Bledsoe-Washington Archives Building. Nevertheless, it is imperative that the library be recognized as a key component to successful research by faculty and students in an institution that increasingly calls for a growth in research. Let us commit to acquiring necessary periodicals, indices and other reference works, and full-text databases that are not currently available but are essential to conducting appropriate and relevant research.

Generally the library provides outstanding service.    

While our students and faculty do not make heavy use of library resources, we do recognize the importance of excellent library resources for a regional, liberal arts university. This is especially true with the new research emphasis on campus. It is imperative that the library have the funds necessary to acquire periodicals, indices, and other research needs, including full-text databases.

The library staff works closely with our department to provide new resources for both our BS and BAS programs.

The Centers have availability to all of the same library resources that are available on campus. With electronic availability of many databases and resources, we have not found this to be a problem. Des Moines and Lynnwood have a library resource person who can assist students and Marcus Kieltyka is the instruction and outreach librarian and he comes to the centers to assist and facilitate the centers with any library issues and also along with the two on-site resources people at Des Moines and Lynnwood gives instruction sessions to students. He also assists the department with the administration of Westlaw by assigning passwords to students each quarter at all locations and assists in doing training on the legal resources and online databases.
In Ellensburg, the main library provides adequate resources, particularly online materials. The department’s new location in Farrell Hall will allow for the establishment of a departmental library/study area. In the future, funds for departmental library acquisitions eg. law materials, will be needed.

Library and Database Resources.  In addition to traditional library book and document holdings, the CWU library allows student and faculty access to over 60 on-line databases and over 9,000 full text periodicals.  Access is mostly available from any location, on campus or remote.  An “Internet Resources” portal, accessible from the library home page, provides an easy launching point from which to navigate to many of these on-line resources.  On the main campus, a micro-format collection and subscriptions to more than 1,900 current journal print titles are available to all users.  Access to library materials is greatly expanded through the university’s participation in the Orbis Cascade Alliance, a consortium that combines the information from Pacific Northwest academic libraries into a single unified database.

The library contains a current selection of undergraduate level textbooks from a wide variety of sub disciplines. The library subscribes to MathSciNet which is a great source for abstracts and mathematical reviews.  Full text articles are not always available, yet often a copy can be requested from a participating library. These resources can be accessed from the centers via courier.

The Music Library is situated on the fourth floor of the university library building, about a ten-minute walk from the Music Building  

The music library is comprised of a score, book, and reference room for music print materials, a small conference room used by the Music Research, History Review and area-specific upper-division history classes, a Music Education resource room, and a listening area for music sound recordings.  The score, book, and reference room is an “open stacks” area which houses collected editions/ historical sets, circulating music scores and books, hardbound music periodicals, and music reference books.  The listening area contains listening carrels which have CD players, phonograph turntables, cassette players and tap-rhythm machines used by music theory students.  All 48 carrels have electrical outlets that students can use for their own laptop computers and portable players.  The conference room is equipped with a sound reproduction system and is used by classes that utilize its proximity to reference material and the recorded music collection.  

The music section of the Central Washington University library contains approximately 9000 books, 5500 scores, and 13200 sound recordings.  The reference area contains most of the ‘standard’ music dictionaries, encyclopedias, biographical compilations and indexes.  The library owns all or partial holdings of the complete works of fifty major composers as well as several monuments of music collections.

Health Programs:  Both School Health and Public Health utilize print and electronic holdings at the library on campus.  Additionally, the SUMMIT holdings are taped regularly for video support.

Physical Education

Food Science & Nutrition:  Graduate students and faculty in nutrition typically require access to journals in the biomedical fields.  They have adequate access to these journals either within the library holdings, online access, or via inter-library loan.

Para-medicine:  The paramedic program does not utilize the library, nor do we maintain anything in the way of a formal library or reference materials for the program.  Because students are in the program for a single year, and because EMS/paramedicine is constantly evolving, each year is taught based off the current years textbook list, which is reviewed and revised annually.  Because of the intense amount of materials covered in the program at this time, there is no formal research component to the program, so library resources needs are limited.

Exercise Science:  Adequate number for undergraduate students.  Graduate students would be better served by a more extensive access to online Physiology and Sports periodicals.

Graduate Programs:  HHPN houses some textbooks (mostly exercise physiology) and several journals (one in exercise science and one in nutrition).  These items are provided by faculty.  Graduate students are also encouraged to access articles on-line either via interlibrary loan or directly accessing journals and downloading PDF files.

The Department relies heavily on the university library as a vital resource (including Internet subscriptions) in conducting faculty and student research at both the beginning and advanced levels.  Faculty work closely with numerous departments in the library, to ensure quality resources for students and instructors alike.  

The CWU Library serves as an important resource for the Physics Department’s ability to meet its instructional, research and service goals.  The CWU Library maintains a collection of 750,000 titles, with approximately 10,000 of these identified as physics or closely allied fields (PCAF).  The library has a limited annual budget and uses input from physics faculty in determining how to best apply these resources for additions to the PCAF collection.  These resources are generally adequate to the teaching and service needs of the Department.  Physics faculty and students have ready access in the collection to a variety of materials that support the curriculum.  The library has proven responsive to requests for additions to the collection in support of these missions.  

However, there are fewer items available in the collection to support the scholarship needs of the Physics Department.  Although there are approximately 120 PCAF journals titles with online access, the journal list is quite incomplete due to the diversity of scholarly activities present in the Physics Department.  However, the Physics Department recognizes the exorbitant costs of journals and that a complete collection is simply not possible given the resources available.  To address this, the CWU Library supports the following programs:

1.  ILLIAD, an interlibrary loan system, 
2.  SUMMIT, a shared non-journal library collection with Oregon and Washington, and 
3.  Online database access (such as Web of Science).

These programs have served the Department’s needs extremely well.  Given the limited journal resources at CWU, these programs have proved indispensible!

There are also a variety of non-PCAF periodical subscriptions frequently used by and useful to physics faculty and students that include Scientific American, Science, Nature, Science News and New Scientist.

-Since we are a social science, and short of interviewing political actors or engaging in politics ourselves, by necessity we rely upon gathering and analyzing data and information, so library resources are crucial to our educational and research objectives.  All of our upper-division courses require some kind of research project component, and library materials are generally the primary means by which all students interact with the field. Given the increased emphasis on research and scholarship by the University, in similar fashion faculty also need strong library resources.

-The library resources for the department have, over the past five years, generally been less than adequate, in the estimation of most faculty, but the situation has been improving the last few years. 

-For example, according to data provided by library collections, at the beginning of the review period, the library budget for purchases of books and monographs for the department was restored (following a cut) to where it had been two years earlier (1998-99), at $3234, but this was over $500 less than its level in 1996-97. When inflation is taken into account, this amounts to be a net cut over time. It has increased, however, to $4629 for 2005-06, which is notable – but this remains LESS than the level of inflation during the period under review. (Assuming 3% inflation, probably somewhat low, the actual budget should be $5016 to equal what we had in 1996-97.)  The journal holdings for the department have also stagnated; after years of cutting, the library held only 26 titles in the field in 2001; this has leveled off after a decline to 21 (the budget, however, has increased from $4500 to $8000, perhaps part of the problem?).
Jan. 08

(January 2008)
The university’s Brooks Library has been very active in developing access to full text electronic journals and web access to library services, including PsycINFO. In the last year, the Summit Alliance has provided us with access to the holdings of academic libraries in Washington and Oregon. We can order books from member libraries and delivery is reasonably prompt. A twice-weekly courier delivers items from the Brooks Library. Individual journal articles may be provided from a member library in photocopy or email PDF form. We can borrow from the holdings of member libraries if we are on that institution’s campus and return the item at our own campus library. Students at our centers have the same borrowing privileges and online access as those on the Ellensburg campus. Students at our centers do not have the Brooks Library nearby, but they have library privileges, including borrowing privileges, at any academic library in the state. A knowledgeable interlibrary loan staff has a good record of finding and ordering items from libraries around the United States. 

Each academic department on campus has a library representative, who consults with our professional librarians about the department’s needs. The library has identified disciplinary experts on its staff, providing us with a librarian who keeps informed about our needs. The psychology department has benefited from a series of active and interested faculty library representatives and our holdings are adequate to our needs. 

Comprehensive library resources are essential to the ability to carry on productive roles as educators and scholars.  Academic and applied research is facilitated by having access to archives containing both current and historical social scientific journals, a broad range of government and organizational records and reference materials, academically-oriented books, and media holdings (ranging from microfilm collections to videotapes/disks and data sets).  Similarly, a well maintained catalog of holdings is essential to the instructional process in order to prepare students to be more informed and literate citizens.  The budget cuts experienced by this institution in general, and the library specifically, have compromised its ability to meet the needs of both faculty and students in the sociology and ethnic studies disciplines.  The staff of the library seems sufficient in size to meet our needs and they have clearly been innovative in attempting to adapt to stressful funding circumstances.  Perhaps most notably they have opened up the lines of communication between departments and the library.  In sum, we appreciate and praise their efforts to meet the needs of the department and overall institution.  However, due to the funding constraints placed upon the library we have lost access to a number of journals and continuing reference sets over the period under review (exacerbating prior declines in library holdings), and the acquisition of new books and media has not kept pace with changes in the sociological and ethnic studies’ knowledge base.  Early on in the five-year period under review the department did not feel that it was adequately consulted when cuts were made in holdings related to our discipline, this communication gap has been rectified.  Prior library staff and managers seldom spoke with departments about their decisions, nor did they seem overly concerned with the impact their actions might have on instruction and scholarship.  Journals were discontinued based upon a cost-savings model without regard to department need (without consultation subscriptions to less essential journals were retained while subscriptions to more critical journals were not), and older journals, data sets, and bulletins were discarded in the interests of increasing storage space for more recent materials (thereby losing a wealth of historical information pertinent to our discipline).
   
The expansion of interlibrary loan programs and electronic holdings has been used to fill some of the dearth in local resources.  While interlibrary loan programs inarguably provide us with access to materials we might not otherwise have and our faculty have found these resources to be quite useful, these programs are not equivalent to having a comprehensive adequately-funded library on our own campus.  Interlibrary loan complicates and lengthens the academic process.  One cannot as readily obtain the information in a timely fashion.  While we have found the research staff to be highly skilled and we have been quite impressed with the expansion of library search engines, it is more complicated and time consuming to order materials through interlibrary loan than it is to pick them out of one’s own stacks.  Moreover, the art of perusing the stacks searching for “just the book or study you were looking for” has been increasingly lost as we have been more and more reliant on interlibrary loan to make up for inadequate up-to-date holdings.  Due dates have necessarily needed to be shortened with shared resources, and many documents and media are simply not included among the list of items libraries are willing to share off site.  Electronic subscriptions have not replaced many of the lost journals, and electronic journals and photocopies received from interlibrary loan seem cold and impersonal (the computer screen and copy paper are clearly no replacements for the feel of a book or journal and being able to appreciate how many of one’s colleagues and students have pondered the same material as evidenced by the wear on the pages).  The loss of paper copies of journals also inhibits our B.S. majors (and others) from browsing the breadth of issues covered under a given area of study (for example, gender studies or organizational analysis) since focusing on specific topics in a computer search doesn’t convey how the field has developed or is organized.

The theatre program recognizes the resources in the library as integral to history and criticism classes, as well as a valuable resource for those in the areas of performance, design, and theatre education.  Both undergraduate and graduate students alike utilize the library as a source of stimulation for undergraduate research projects and graduate thesis projects.  The faculty works cooperatively with library personnel to help obtain theatre-related materials.