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Printer-Friendly ModeZahnow Library reflects technological advances
March 27, 2006 —
SVSU's Melvin J. Zahnow Library opened in 1987 in modest fashion. In 2006, the Library covers around 80,000 square feet of floor space and possesses over 600,000 audio, video, and print items. More than 20,000 patrons are served yearly and several times that number makes use of the Library's Web page and CardCat system, implemented in 1997.
The newest additions to the Library include the Student Technology Center, which students can use to receive any technology-related assistance; the Roberta R. Allen Reading Room, an architecturally pleasing addition that employs notoriously comfortable chairs and a view of SVSU's courtyard and surrounding environs; the Library Cafe on the third floor, and finally, the Library Instruction/Research Lab on the first floor.
These new services and physical additions to the Library make it more useful than ever, and not just for students - faculty, staff, and guests from the Saginaw Valley region all utilize the Library's services. This trend can only ensure one thing: that the Melvin J. Zahnow Library will continue to expand - physically and virtually.
Comparing Zahnow Library
The libraries of Michigan's public universities serve their students well. While there were great discrepancies in some of the numbers the Vanguard acquired, those figures should be viewed contextually. For instance, the University of Michigan Ann Arbor possesses around 6.5 million bound volumes throughout its many libraries. Compare this figure to Grand Valley State University's Zumberge Library, which possesses around 668,000 volumes.
While GVSU's collection may seem miniscule in comparison, one must understand that both institutions serve fundamentally different bodies of students and faculty. The University of Michigan places considerable emphasis on graduate education and research, while GVSU tends to concentrate on providing a well-rounded undergraduate education.
It should also be noted that Michigan's public universities vary widely in age, budget, and service region, and their respective libraries will reflect this. Again, an example: SVSU's Library materials budget hovers somewhere around the $650,000 mark By comparison, Oakland University allots nearly $2 million for the salaries of its library employees alone.
Again, the characteristics of each university will reveal some possible reasons for this discrepancy: according to OU's Web site, "UGS, a leading global supplier of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, is donating a PLM software grant to OU with a commercial value of $30.2 million (the donation amount is $21.2 million). For whatever reason, donations to SVSU have never quite approached a similar level.
Finally, the libraries of Michigan's public universities will reflect the needs of their patrons, including - and perhaps especially - our own Zahnow Library. If you find yourself asking "Why doesn't the Library offer this?" simply speak with one of the professional librarians. There is also an online ask-and-answer service readily available at library.svsu.edu.
The Library is a tremendously important facility at any educational institution, and the people behind the scenes work very hard at what they do. They make it easy to do good research.
Library adapts to new technology
Library Science has changed dramatically in the past decade - as more and more databases, documents and audio/visual resources become digitized, libraries, especially university libraries, have had to adapt. SVSU's Zahnow Library has done an exceptional job of doing so, offering students, faculty, and guests access to a truly vast array of online material.
Most recently, the Library has profiled its holdings for upload in the Michigan Electronic Library database, or MeL. MeL aims to catalogue the collections for all of Michigan's libraries. This database has the potential to make Interlibrary Loan requests process much faster.
This evolution is reflected by a number of statistics. For example, in-person visits in the Library decreased from around 216,000 in 2003-2004 to 189,500 in 2004-2005, but "virtual" visits to the Library's Web site increased dramatically from around 2.5 million in 2003-2004 to almost 3 million in 2004-2005.
Preparing a library to meet research needs in the 21st Century costs money, however: Zahnow Library currently offers access to more than 40 online databases, and subscriptions to many of them can be quite expensive. At the high end of the spectrum, the ProQuest Psychology/APA Journals database cost the University around $23,500 in 2004-2005, and the Library projects this cost will increase to nearly $24,000 for 2005-2006.
In comparison, the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database costs approximately $6,700 a year. That figure reflects something close to the "average" cost of an online database. In any case, the total cost of subscriptions adds up to $189,213 a year. This cost constitutes a significant portion of the overall Library budget.
Making good use of these resources is important, considering that as state funding continues to dwindle, the money used to cover the costs of those databases will increasingly be supplied by student tuition and fees.
Managing the cost of resources
The costs of maintaining a well-stocked Library are considerable. In FY2005, Zahnow Library spent nearly $188,000 on books, $244,000 on periodicals, $38,000 on access services, $66,079 on electronic databases, and $112,000 on electronic journals. The rest of the Library's budget went to the salaries of the professional librarians and administrative staff.
So what exactly did these funds provide students, faculty members, and staff with? The Library separates the statistics into four categories: print materials, non-print materials (microfilm), media (audio, film, slides, maps, etc), and electronic titles. Specifically: 222,673 books, periodicals, and government documents; 370,141 microfilm slides; 24,698 films, audio recordings, slides, reference cd-roms, art prints, and maps, and 17,383 e-books, index/reference databases, and journals. The total Library holdings as of 2005 were 634,895 items. It is probably of little coincidence that the mean cost of an item in the Library is a little over $1.
The aforementioned figures are certainly not astronomical, especially when compared to libraries of larger public universities like MSU. Yet one should realize that the larger universities often have entire systems of libraries, with individual libraries designed to suit very specific departmental needs.
SVSU's Zahnow Library is not one of many, and necessarily cannot house the kind of collections one would be instantly impressed by.
Yet the Library serves SVSU in other equally important ways. There is a strong emphasis on technology, as evidenced by several open-use computers scattered throughout the library, a large instructional technology lab, and the Student Technology Center. This reflects the University's overarching technological focus - the 9.28:1 student-to-computer ratio is a familiar statistic to many, appearing often in SVSU-related press releases and in other media.
In addition, trends in technology are slowly eliminating the need for vast, cavernous libraries. Digitizing materials not only saves space, but it allows research institutions to save time and money - two resources that many libraries are finding increasingly scarce. The Melvin J. Zahnow Library realizes this, and accordingly adopts technologies to supplement - and in some cases, replace - traditional assets.