Tu Luong Foundation Library

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Statement of Needs

This project will have widespread positive effects, not only for our students and faculty, but also for families, communities, and society.  And, of course, the SXYZ Library will make its collections and informational resources available to other schools and their students in our area.  The further growth of TUV XYZ Bible Institute depends critically upon the development of its library.  An effective library has always been essential to higher education and life-long learning.  At the end of the twentieth century, any library’s effectiveness depends heavily upon its use of advanced technologies.  The proposed project will address needs in four areas:  local information, worldwide information, global availability and competitiveness.

Local Information Needs

The pace of modern life has grown too rapid to waste time wondering, “Where’s that book?” – or, “I wonder whether we have a book about this?”  As at many other schools, this problem is exacerbated at the SXYZ Library, because our students are commuters.  They don’t live in a dormitory, an easy five minute walk away from the library.  How frustrating it is to spend twenty or thirty minutes driving to campus, only to find that it is difficult to discover whether the library even owns the needed materials – and, if so, whether they are checked out, and to whom.

Unlike most small libraries, ours has never gone through the normal card catalog phase.  At the start, we recognized that it would be more useful to move directly to a digital catalog.  We have made much progress in cataloging our materials and assembling a machine-readable collection of records.  But this information has been gathered without benefit of high-cost library database software that would make it available to library users.  So far as our students and faculty are concerned, we still don’t have a catalog.  SXYZ needs to provide rapid, easy access to a digital catalog and circulation system, both on-campus and via dialup modems and direct Internet connection.

Global Information Needs

The information revolution is completely changing the nature of publishing.  No longer is publication limited to the expensive production, transportation, storage and marketing of books and periodicals made from cellulose.  With rapidly increasing frequency, authors’ materials are being published on light-weight, inexpensive compact disks and on the World Wide Web.  This sweeping realignment of basic economic forces generally has the result that it now makes sound economic sense for publishers, authors, educational institutions and even interested amateurs to make materials available via the Internet, at very low prices – and in many cases completely free of charge.  Increasingly, important reference materials, current research, popular works of fact and fiction and library materials of all genres will be delivered over the net – all of which rapidly accelerates the rate at which information becomes available on the net.  Plainly, the SXYZ Library must equip itself to provide students and faculty ready access to this information flood.

Global Availability Needs

Beyond the need for students and faculty to reach out to the world, there is also a wonderful opportunity for the SXYZ Library to give the world access to a unique resource:  Housed within the Library is the Charles F. Parham Center for Pentecostal-Charismatic Studies, one of the world’s ten most extensive special collections of books, magazines, pamphlets and other primary historical references on the topics of the Holy Spirit and the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement.  The Parham Center holds important research materials that simply do not exist anywhere else.  It would be an immense benefit to Christian scholars throughout the world if its holdings were listed in an online catalog accessible through the Internet.  If non-copyright portions of the collection, most of which are unique, could be digitized for actual access over the net, the benefit would be incalculable.  But this opportunity is not merely a “nice-to-have”; it is a need.  SXYZ is a component of a global system of higher learning, in which it is recognized that each institution makes its own unique resources available to the whole – this cooperation is especially essential for Christian institutions.  SXYZ must make its special contribution available through the Internet.

Competitiveness Needs

It may seem strange to speak of competitiveness in the context of Christian institutions – and we certainly don’t mean to suggest that SXYZ is in competition with other Christian colleges.  But in a sense we do compete – for students.  Young people graduating from today’s high schools expect that any college they choose to attend will provide certain minimum facilities.  If we don’t provide them, the best students will go elsewhere. 

In previous generations, students made their choice on the basis of such factors as dormitories, classrooms, laboratories, faculty, social opportunities and library holdings.  All of these factors remain, but many are losing their relative importance.  Increasingly, the critical factors are based less on bricks and mortar and more on access to information:  Who’s on the faculty?  How can students interact with other students and with faculty?  How easy is it to get copies of important published materials – books, journals, information in general?  Modern information technology has a strong bearing on all of these information essentials.  Perhaps it should not be so surprising that the cold technologies of email, web pages, chat services and teleconferencing often mediate very human interactions, allowing “meetings” of people who only rarely are able to be physically in the same place.  SXYZ must provide a level of technical services that will attract serious students.

Project Goals

There are four goals in our technology plan:

1.       To provide effective access to library information resources.

2.       To provide effective access to Internet information resources.

3.       To provide effective Internet availability of SXYZ Library materials.

4.       To provide technical services that meet reasonable faculty and student expectations.

Functions to Be Automated

To give our faculty and students the library services that they need, we will have to automate the following functional areas, most of which currently have no automated support:

Cataloging

To catalog a book, journal, videotape, audiotape, or other library item is to fully and accurately determine a large number of pieces of information about that item – identifying and classifying it, and recording this information according to standardized data formats.  The process is an exacting one that is extremely labor intensive if performed manually.  A small school library cannot afford enough personnel to do this job well.  Yet accurate cataloging is the cornerstone of library automation – without it, the rest is impossible.  Automated cataloging software can vastly reduce the labor and speed the shelving of library materials.  At present, SXYZ has no automated cataloging aids.

Card Catalog

Instead of a paper card catalog, an automated library has what is called an “online public-access catalog”.  An OPAC is much less expensive to maintain than a card catalog, as well as much more accessible – via local terminals within the library, via dial-up modems, or via the World Wide Web.  But SXYZ has neither card nor electronic catalog.

Acquisitions

The same software that can ease the job of cataloging and maintaining an OPAC also has facilities to aid the process of acquiring library materials.  A library automation system helps the library staff to discover what materials exist that meet user needs; tracks the process of ordering, receiving, cataloging and shelving materials; and apprises library users of what materials are expected to become available.  Manual acquisition systems are massive exercises in the shepherding of myriad pieces of paper.  An automated system can vastly reduce the errors and costs of the process.  At present, the SXYZ library’s acquisition system is purely manual.

Circulation

The circulation component of a library automation system increases the speed and accuracy of the entire process of circulating materials; provides systematic control and awareness of the state of each collection; improves handling of holds and other specialized circulation applications; offers better and more timely management information and statistics; and maintains confidentiality of patron and staff record files against unauthorized use.  Today, the SXYZ Library circulation system is entirely manual and consists of patrons simply recording, on a publicly posted list, which items they are taking out.

Serials

Traditional, manual methods of controlling periodicals are heavily labor intensive, to the point that most libraries do not even permit magazines and journals to circulate.  It’s simply too much work to keep track of periodicals, beyond recording that a particular volume and issue number has arrived within the library’s holdings.  With an automated system, a periodical becomes just another library item.  Once the series is cataloged, the arrival of a new issue merely requires a quick entry in the database – after which the issue can be permitted to circulate – or not – exactly like any other library material.  If it’s needed for common reference, it can easily be marked as noncirculating; otherwise, the library staff can easily afford to let it go wherever the library’s clientele needs to use it.  At present, the SXYZ Library has no serials system – neither manual nor automated.

Preservation

A key technical service of the SXYZ Library will be the preservation of rare materials, especially those of the Parham Center.  Part of this effort will be the full-image scan digitization of public domain books, pamphlets, magazines and other important historical materials.  But scanning alone is not sufficient.  To be fully useful, many of these materials will have to undergo the addition step of having these images of text semiautomatically converted to electronically stored and searchable text files. 

After conversion, these library materials can be automatically indexed, not just by title, author, etc., but by their full text content – greatly amplifying a human scholar’s ability to develop useful knowledge from the raw data recorded in the library.  Today, the SXYZ Library has no automated preservation program.