Doheny Memorial Library: Same
Address, New Role as Intellectual 
Center
Jerry D. Campbell, Chief Information Officer and Dean of the University Libraries

I appreciate the opportunity to provide this brief perspective on USC libraries and want to use it to accomplish two objectives. The first is to provide a picture of the comparative quality of our libraries, and the second is to outline some of the library challenges we face. There are numerous subjects not included here, and I would be glad to address them in subsequent issues.

USC Libraries Today

Quality: First I want to observe that the quality of USC libraries is better than it is often thought to be. Though the definition of quality may be argued, the customary method for determining quality in research libraries is to look at a measurement known as the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Membership Index. ARL includes the 111 major academic research libraries in the US and Canada and derives its Membership Index from a formula based on five variables: volumes held, volumes added annually, number of current serial titles, total library expenditures, and total number of professional and support staff. According to this Index which is published annually, USC libraries rank 12th among private research university libraries in North America. We expect this ranking to improve next year because our government document holdings (487,581 volumes) will for the first time be included in our total volume count (as they have long been included in the total volume count of our peers). For perspective, this will place USC along side Northwestern, just ahead of Johns Hopkins and Emory, and just behind Duke and NYU. Similarly, within California, USC ranks fourth behind Stanford, Berkeley, and UCLA.

In addition, it is our goal that USC libraries be equally or more competitive with regard to providing access to information in digital form. Currently, however, the only measure of our quality in this regard represented in the above ARL Membership Index is expressed by including electronic serial titles in the third criterion. The need for better measurements for digital information is generally recognized, and USC libraries have been participating over the past several months in an ARL project to devise such measurements for the full scope of digital information now present in research libraries. The resulting new measurement instrument will be pilot tested later this spring.

Because of the importance of total volume count in the ARL Membership Index, I should make one additional point. USC's total holdings now number over 4,000,000 (the exact number is recalculated each fall). It is not the volume count, of course, that is important, it is access to their contents. Thus, while it is impossible for us to find, afford, or shelve large numbers of print volumes, USC libraries have long employed three additional means of providing access to their contents. The first is to acquire substantial resources in microform. This was pursued especially heavily during the 1970's, 80's, and 90's. As a consequence, USC library microform holdings are larger than its physical volume holdings, numbering 5,764,715 microform volumes and ranking 4th among private universities in microform holdings. In order to enhance the visibility and availability of these materials, microforms will be relocated to the main floor (North wing) upon the reopening of Doheny Library in September. The second means of increasing access to missing volumes is represented by the library's Global Express, a service to facilitate document delivery from other libraries. Global Express will also be relocated to the first floor (North wing) of Doheny Library in September to make it more accessible. And the third means of providing access to a greater range of volumes is the ongoing effort to maintain reciprocal borrowing arrangements with UCLA and Caltech. In addition, we have lately reinforced access to other library holdings by joining a consortium of 30 research libraries covering the West and mid-West. One purpose of the consortium is to guarantee speedy reciprocal borrowing.

Challenges: While the above rankings of traditional library measurements may not be commensurate with our ambitions, they clearly place us in excellent company and ahead of many fine institutions. Why, then, do our libraries sometimes seem inadequate? I believe the answer lies in several challenging circumstances that have made comparatively strong collections difficult to use-but that are the sorts of things that are never measured by ARL. Most notable among these are:

• Incomplete library holdings in the online catalog. Approximately one out of five books have not been represented in the online catalog making them effectively invisible. A large retrospective conversion project to rectify this situation was begun in 1997 and will be completed this summer. For the first time, this will allow records for all USC book holdings to appear in a single place. This is especially important because the USC collection is distributed among the various branch libraries.
• Incorrect records in the catalog (for books lost or stolen or for books with no records). Since January 1998, library faculty and staff have undertaken a partial inventory of books by comparing the monographic collection records from the SIRSI database with the books on the shelf and the circulation records in order to correct discrepancies. Concentrating on the most heavily used portions of the collection, this inventory has now covered 338,000 volumes (and records) and included key areas in Doheny, Business, Leavey, Science & Engineering, Art/Architecture, and Philosophy libraries. This effort has increased the success rate for paging books from 78% to 94%. This compares to a 57% success rate for Doheny Library users before the retrofit was begun. Because we maintain open stacks, this inventory function must be an ongoing and permanent feature of stack maintenance.
• Lack of an online database of serial holdings. Serials constitute the most heavily used portion of the library collection, yet we do not offer a record of issue-level holdings among our online library records. In addition to making it difficult and time consuming for library users to find specific items, lack of online records necessitates the manual processing of thousands of journal issues including creating requisitions for payment of bills. This problem will be addressed in a project that began this year and will be finished in the 2002-03 academic year.
• Overcrowding on library shelves. Almost every branch library, including Doheny, has long been overcrowded, making it impossible to maintain orderliness and accommodate new additions to collections. Since January 1998, library faculty and staff have systematically removed to a nearby storage facility over 425,000 volumes in order to make on-site collections more useable. Accommodating the Doheny retrofit delayed our general progress in decompressing branch library stacks, but the process will resume. Indeed, this process of moving books to storage must continue annually at a rate that matches the acquisition of new books. Our goal in decompressing library stacks is to achieve and maintain the standard maximum research library stack-fill rate of 80%.
• Antiquated physical facilities. Both because of their age and the changes underway as a result of the use of technology in scholarly publishing, most of USC's libraries have been in need of some level of renovation (as appropriate for their subjects). Some renovations have already been carried out (Accounting Library, Business Library, East Asian Library, Leavey Library, and Social Work Library); Doheny is in process; and others (notably Science and Engineering and VKC) remain to be undertaken. This particular challenge requires its own report. Suffice it to say here that it remains a priority.

Thus, over the past decades, we have accumulated several circumstances that have each been an impediment to successful library service and that together created significant frustrations. Fortunately, at this time, library faculty and staff are making rapid progress toward solving these large and longstanding problems. If such efforts are successful, our library experience on campus may finally be as good as the measurements suggest it should be.