Harvard University

**Update Report, ALA Midwinter**

**January, 2007**

**Submitted by Dan Hazen and Marilyn Wood**

This report summarizes major recent developments in collection
development, public services, and technical services at Harvard
University. The primary focus is the Harvard College Library (HCL),
which accounts for about two-thirds of collections, budgets, and
activity within the Harvard University Library. We also highlight the
University Library as appropriate.

**[General]{.underline}**

***Recruitment***

Numerous recruitments have come to closure during the months just past.
Haden Guest has arrived as head of the Harvard Film Archive, Diane
Geraci as head of HCL\'s Social Science Program, and Mikyong Kang as the
Librarian for the Korean Collections. Michael Leach is now Head of
Collection Development in the Cabot Science Library. Rebecca Graham is
HCL\'s Associate Librarian for Administrative Services -Designate,
working with the incumbent, Susan Lee, until Susan\'s July 1 retirement.
Many other major searches remain underway or will soon be launched,
among them: HCL\'s Associate Librarian for Research and Instruction, the
Head of HCL Technical Services, the Head of Widener Library Access
Services, the English-language Bibliographer for the Humanities, the
Germanic Division Head within HCL Technical Services, the Head of
Cataloging Support Services in HCL Technical Services and the Hyde
Curator in the Houghton Library. Additional information concerning these
positions can be found at:
[http://jobs.harvard.edu/jobs/search_req](http://jobs.harvard.edu/jobs/search_req ).
Prof. Sidney Verba, long-time Director of the Harvard University Library
as well as Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor, will retire in
June. The head of the University Library is by tradition a senior member
of Harvard\'s teaching faculty; the search to designate Sid\'s successor
is now underway, against an arguably larger backdrop of searches for the
next Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and also for a new
University President.

***Facilities and Planning***

A gradual process of programmatic change and facilities consolidation
continues throughout the University Library. A number of
department-funded research libraries, among them the Psychology Research
Library and the Biological Laboratories Library, have either closed or
been folded into other units. Collections and services associated with
the College Library\'s Social Sciences Program, the Lamont Library, and
the Fine Arts Library are all engaged in elaborate planning processes
for relocation and concomitant shifts in service and emphasis. The
Lamont Library is in its second year of very popular 24/5 service and
the handsomely appointed Lamont Library Café, featuring a light menu of
prepackaged foods, snacks and beverages and seating approximately 100,
opened to enthusiastic reviews in October. The Countway Library of
Medicine is clearing space and shifting staff to support a
Bioinformatics initiative. A new facility for the Harvard University
Library for the first time accommodates together the Office for
Information Systems, the administrative offices for the Harvard
Depository, the Open Collections Program, and the Weissman Preservation
Center.

Other professional school libraries at Harvard are grappling with
changing constituencies, some of them associated with cross-school
programs. These and similar unit-level shifts provide part of the
context for a continuing, Library-wide process of planning and
organizational adjustment in order to acknowledge and facilitate our
increasing interdependence. The Harvard University Library (HUL) is
revamping its high-level committee structure to reflect its
constituents\' common strategic challenges and concerns. Our diverse
approaches to funding, staffs, and decision-making remain at once a
source of strength and of unending debate. Emerging collaborative
efforts are bringing the advantages ever more to the fore.

**[Collections and Content]{.underline}**

***Collections Budgets and Strategies***

Collections budgets within the Harvard College Library (HCL) grew only
modestly for the current fiscal year. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences,
HCL\'s parent body, is in austerity mode as it addresses the financial
consequences of significant faculty hiring, new buildings, and
programmatic expansion. The endowment payouts that provide more than 60%
of HCL\'s acquisitions funds nonetheless saw FY 2007 growth sufficient
to expand our current materials budget by some 4.6%, to about \$15.7
million. (This amount represents a bit more than half of Harvard\'s
total outlay on library materials.) Due to restrictions for endowment
funds these dollars are not spread evenly across all subject areas and
we still fall short in development of collections in some critical
areas.

The increasing array of electronic resources available to the academic
community, and the continuing expansion of the e-resource marketplace to
include products from \"new\" parts of the globe---for instance China
and Japan---have gradually outpaced our ability to act either promptly
or strategically. We are therefore continuing a multi-year, multi-level
effort that will upgrade our e-resource staffing, streamline our
procedures, rationalize our budgets \[well...\], improve our tracking
and reporting systems, and ensure more agile and effective services. We
continue to implement sometimes difficult e-resource decisions, for
example by ending our contracts with ebrary and Emerald, and through our
extended negotiations with Elsevier and for products like Science
Online. We are vigorously implementing e-reserve capabilities, building
e-resources into course websites, and otherwise exploring the full
potential of the digital realm.

***Scholarly Communication and Digital Projects***

A \"Provost\'s Committee on Scholarly Communication,\" including both
faculty members and librarians, is grappling with broad issues of
intellectual property, licensing, and appropriate cost structures. One
major thrust involves possible action by the University\'s various
faculties to grant the University non-exclusive rights to all scholarly
articles produced by faculty members.

Our evolving approach to collections and content reflects our emerging
sense of the Library\'s role in a new information environment. As a
Google participant, we are acutely aware of the possible implications of
the massive online availability of digitized \"legacy\" materials---on
the one hand promising new possibilities and posing new challenges for
the scholarly process, on the other raising fundamental questions about
the uncertain intersection between the commercial and academic sectors,
the role of back-up and/or \"archival\" hardcopy collections, the limits
and preferred parameters of redundancy, and the best utilization of our
materials budgets going forward.

Agendas like that proposed during the late 2005 Janus Conference at
Cornell have attracted particular attention as we consider Harvard\'s
future collections role. Focusing on but one of the six Janus
challenges, retrospective digitization, the Library is energetically
pursuing digitizing projects of its own, in addition to the Google
effort. At least three streams of activity have so far come into play:

-   The University Library\'s internally-funded \"Library Digital
    Initiative,\" launched in 1998, has resulted in more than thirty
    moderate-sized projects to digitize text, images, sound, and
    geospatial information. These projects, and others as well, have
    also enabled us to develop a substantial digital infrastructure
    that, for example, includes the \"Digital Repository Service\" to
    ensure long-term archiving for digital objects.

-   HUL\'s \"Open Collections Program\" <http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/>
    complements our LDI projects with externally-funded projects of
    somewhat larger scope and ambition. \"Women Working,\"
    [http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/](http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/  )
    for example, offers a broad array of materials that illustrate women
    in the American economy through the early twentieth century.

-   Finally, the Library is building a permanent funding structure for
    in-house digitizing, to complement the physical infrastructure and
    staff that are already in place. Dedicated, permanent (i.e.
    non-project) funding for digital activity now comes to about
    \$250,000 per year, and the amount continues to grow.

The next logical step, also being very actively pursued, centers on
joint projects with scholars and repositories throughout the world as a
means to preserve and organize unique research resources. Original
materials that need to stay where they are can thus be preserved and
also made freely accessible to all. Work with African oral histories, or
to microfilm or digitize archival resources in Latin America, exemplify
this growing concern.

***JSTOR Dark Archive***

In 2005-2006, the Harvard University Library worked in collaboration
with JSTOR and JSTOR participants to create an analog (paper) back-up to
the JSTOR digital database.  As of the end of 2006, 83% of the content
accumulated in the database through October, 2003, was held in the JSTOR
Dark Archive at the Harvard Depository, a total of nearly 77,000
issues.  This material will not circulate, except to JSTOR for the
purposes of retrospective conversion or recovery.  A website will be
available soon that will highlight issues that are needed; the JSTOR
Dark Archive at Harvard welcomes gap issues.  A prospective contract
with JSTOR, 2004 and forward, is being negotiated.

**[Public Services]{.underline}**

***HCL Web-site***

After considerable consultation and input, the HCL public web-site was
relaunched in fall 2005
[http://hcl.harvard.edu/.](http://hcl.harvard.edu/.  ) The Web
Production Team worked with all stakeholders in the redesign plan and
implementation by conducting an extensive series of meetings,
circulating drafts and solicitation of input including a feedback form
on the Intranet site and periodic news stories with links to the
production team's email addresses. Through this process, the production
team found that after identifying their audience the best way to seek
input was through focus groups or planned conversations. They were able
to determine what users wanted and to define the purpose of the site,
which, in turn, informed the designer about the optimum architecture and
format. Their experience highlighted that our secondary audience had a
very different set of criteria for how the site should be organized and
how it should look as compared to our primary audience -- undergraduates
and graduate students.

A related project was undertaken last fall to redesign the template used
to create web research guides and to also systematically review each
guide in use. Research guides are very heavily used components of the
HCL web-site. Approximately 150 guides were reviewed in the process and
specific guidelines have been developed that outline future creation,
maintenance and quality control going forward.

***Instruction and Outreach***

With increased access to electronic resources and a need to better
educate our instructor population of their presence, very specifically
to use those resources as opposed to placing items in Coursepacks (with
high costs to students), a systematic effort was made by our library
liaisons to meet with all departments and instructors. These sessions as
well as documentation on our web site are available to any instructor
who is interested in learning more about our electronic resources and/or
how to link to those resources from their course web-sites.

**[Technical Services and Metadata]{.underline}**

***LC Series Decision***

Following LC's decision to cease series authority control, a working
group was established to study the impact at Harvard. A Standing
Subcommittee on Bibliographic Standards and Policy gathered information
from a wide variety of selectors, acquisitions, public services, and
government documents librarians and others to gauge the importance of
series (in the discovery process) to patrons and to library operations.
There was strong, though not unanimous support for continuing to control
numbered series, given the research nature of the collections. Most felt
that unnumbered series could be left uncontrolled. A recommendation was
presented to and approved by the University Library Council that
included the following:

-   Continue control of numbered series

-   Discontinue control of unnumbered series and determine what other
    categories of series may not need control (e.g. publishers\' series)

-   Evaluate the importance of series in resource discovery over the
    next year

-   Discuss with our peer institutions, at the appropriate level, a plan
    for a cooperative effort to fill in the gap left by LC\'s decision

-   Monitor the development of automated solutions to series authority
    control

-   Reevaluate Harvard\'s decision in a year after more is known about
    the impact of this decision, more of our peers have taken informed
    positions, and RDA is closer to completion.

***Barcoding Project***

In anticipation of the Google project, several libraries on campus have
been involved in smart barcoding projects to barcode the remaining
unbarcoded monographic collections in their stacks. In the Widener
stacks, staff reviewed more than 650,000 titles. This smart barcoding
process is being followed by a sweep of the entire stacks to barcode all
other unbarcoded material. This long desired for project, has already
proven an effective means to identify problem records, missing items,
items bound together and many other substantial collection management
issues that we will undoubtedly be resolving for years to come.

***OCLC Reclamation***

Harvard has begun a series of OCLC reclamation projects for its 28
active symbols, one symbol at a time. By adding the over 1 million keyed
records from recon that were never represented in WorldCat and removing
holdings for materials that have been deaccessioned or lost, we hope
WorldCat will present a much more accurate picture of materials in the
Harvard libraries.

***ERM/VERDE***

In the spring of 2003, Harvard, MIT and ExLibris embarked on a
collaboration to develop an e-resource management system. While ExLibris
worked on the development of Verde, Harvard invested in the short-term
development of an interim system known as ERM. Following an evaluation
of Verde last fall, Harvard has decided to move ahead with a Verde 2.0
implementation this spring. Verde 2.0 currently provides most critical
ERM functionality and will adequately replace the functionality
currently served by the Harvard ERM. The project will include the
migration of data from our local ERM to Verde, the review and revision
of e-resource management workflows and data standards that take into
account the interrelationship with data currently maintained in Aleph.

***E-user reporting for Harvard's ILS - COGNOS***

For more than a decade, Harvard librarians have had access to
self-service reports that provided specialized lists and statistical
information about Harvard's collection and its usage. Data is extracted
into a separate, dedicated reporting data warehouse on a nightly basis
and used by all major functional areas of the integrated library system.

With the migration to Aleph in 2002, the data extracted from the new ILS
brought with it new challenges for reporting. Most specifically, our
query tool was unable to fully support diacritics and other special
characters inherent to a UTF-8 database containing bibliographic data.

Last year Harvard acquired Cognos ReportNet and has set up a Library
Reporting Center using the existing data warehouse and the Cognos
product. In late 2006, the first phase of implementation began,
introducing web-based reporting with predefined reports to end users. A
second phase in 2007 will introduce web-based report authoring.

***ILS Upgrade and projects***

Harvard University upgraded its ExLibris/Aleph system to v18 in August
2006. In October, additional non-Latin language scripts were added
(Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Greek).

Later this year, the Baker Business Library will migrate from Voyager to
Aleph.

The holdings of the Biblioteca Berenson - The Library of Villa I Tatti
at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in
Florence Italy, will be updated later this year after a 10 year hiatus.

***Casalini Records***

HCL currently receives both provisional and full records from Casalini.
These provisional records are used as a tool for firm ordering.
Additionally, HCL receives full cataloged and classified records for
most of the Casalini approval plan materials. This has made possible
much streamlining in processes and most of the newly received Italian
material is cataloged on receipt.

***Harrassowitz records with German and English Keywords***

For approximately six months, Harvard has been receiving vendor supplied
records with both German and English keywords. The purpose of this
project is to provide patrons with greater access to these materials
while they are part of the cataloging backlog. It is anticipated that
cataloging will be expedited by the presence of these keywords. An
unexpected secondary benefit has been for the acquisitions staff, who
can better identify the appropriate endowed fund (that might have
funding restrictions) when the subject keywords are available.

***Aleph processing enhancements***

Harvard has successfully designed, tested and implemented vendor loads
of MARC records (from Yankee) that go directly into the main Harvard
bibliographic database and simultaneously create associated holding,
item, order and budget transactions in our ILS.

A pilot project is also underway for EDI invoices for serial purchases.