University Libraries
University of Georgia
Annual Report
April 3, 2006
Highlighted Achievements
Library Materials Budget -- Maintained adequate funding for library materials and
avoided the cancellation of journals or electronic resources. This was due to a permanent
addition to the base Library Materials Budget and to one-time funds provided by the
University.
Collections
 Passed the four-million volume mark, one of only 36 academic libraries in North
American to achieve this milestone to date.
 Acquired a major collection of tapes and other materials relating to Watergate.
 Received a significant collection of Chinese language materials from the Chinese
government.
 Use of electronic resources continues to climb, with use of electronic journals
surpassing 1.5M articles retrieved.
 Combining private funds with limited state dollars, we acquired two critical
databases to support research and instruction:
 backfiles for many Elsevier journals
 the Archive of Americana with 72,000 books and pamphlets published in
America from 1639 to 1819.
Digital Library of Georgia – This project continues to develop digital collections that
focus on the history and culture of Georgia. Some examples of new collections
introduced in 2005 include Sanborn insurance maps of Georgia, Douglass Theatre
Collection, Brunswick Liberty Ship Building Collection, and Augusta Historic
Postcards.
Student Learning Center – Use of this facility continues to increase with gatecounts for
the library portion of the building exceeding 1.5M for 2005.
Significant grants:
 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for
$761,427 to support the Civil Rights Digital Library initiative.
 $200,000 in federal funds administered by the state Department of Public Library
Services to support digitization efforts in partnership with public libraries in
Georgia.
Strategic Plan Changes
The current Strategic Plan can be found on the Libraries Web Site at:
http://www.libs.uga.edu/staff/strategic.html
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The Five-Year Program Plan for the Libraries was submitted in October. It has
not yet been formally approved by the Provost. The plan as submitted is available at:
http://dataserv.libs.uga.edu/assessment/fiveyearplan.html
The four goals listed in the Five-Year Program Plan are:
Goal 1: The Evolving Collection: Blending Access, Ownership, and Preservation – The
modern library collection is a mix of traditional print and a growing body of electronic
publications. Our challenge is providing the best blend of these resources in a package
that is easily understood and used.
Goal 2: The Teaching Library: Building Partnerships – The complexity of modern
information technology has required librarians to expand our original role as custodians
of books. We need to continue to actively seek opportunities to interact with faculty and
students and collaborate with them at all stages of the learning process and with all
sources and formats of information.
Goal 3: The Strengthened Heart of the University: Library Buildings – Even with
increased electronic resources, the library as a place is critical in higher education, as
evidenced by the Student Learning Center. We need to provide facilities that support a
community of scholars.
Goal 4: The Empowered Staff: Investing in the Staff and Faculty of the Libraries –
Librarians, archivists, IT professionals, and other staff provide services and programs that
are as vital as the collection to the mission of the University. We need to ensure that this
valuable group is trained, compensated, and given the resources they need.
Progress in Program Priorities
The mission of the University Libraries is to provide students and faculty with the
greatest possible access to recorded knowledge using technology and facilities that
encourage research, study, and discourse. To that end, we have identified the following
program priorities:
Ensure an Adequate Budget for Library Materials
The University Libraries have two distinct budgets. First, as with all campus
units, there is a budget for Personnel and Operations. Second, there is the budget for
Library Materials. This second budget is a University wide asset because it ensures
access to the scholarly record that is essential for research and instruction.
The flow of books, journals, and electronic resources is much like the utilities of
electricity and water that the University depends upon for its day to day operations. As
with these utilities, scholarly communication is beset by uncontrollable cost increases.
The price of publications, especially journals in both print and electronic form, continues
to rise at a rate beyond the cost of living. Across all types of publications, we see
increases that average about 5% per year.
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These continuing cost increases, combined with budget cuts in recent years, have
made it difficult to maintain the level of purchases needed to support research and
instruction. Fortunately, one-time funding has allowed us to avoid significant journal
cancellations. Even more important, for FY06, the University was able to provide a
significant increase to the base budget, the first in five years.
However, even with the increase to the base budget, we could face a significant
deficit in FY07 due to inflation and to budget cuts in recent years. This deficit could lead
to heavy cancellations of journal and database subscriptions.
The most recent information available shows that for FY04 we ranked 35th out of
the 114 members of the Association of Research Libraries for expenditures for Library
Materials. We have never ranked lower than 35th and our average rank over the past
twenty years has been 31st.
While the Libraries administer the Library Materials Budget, it truly is a
University wide resource that provides the books, journals, electronic resources, and
other publications that constitute the flow of scholarly and scientific communication.
It should be pointed out that the support of the University has allowed us to
maintain the prevailing level of acquisitions, which is appropriate to the University’s
programs and curriculum. However, as new programs are added, especially in the health
sciences and in engineering, this level of acquisition may prove to be inadequate.
Increase Classified Staff Salaries
Classified staff salaries for most library employees are painfully low and do not
reflect the sophisticated and complex activities that are required to organize, preserve,
and interpret library resources and services. The work frequently requires a college
degree and many of our employees have significant supervisory responsibilities. Despite
these responsibilities and requirements, 52% of our classified staff are within $3,000 of
the University’s lowest base of $17,500 and 65% are within $3,000 of the base of their
classification minimum salary (with 45% of those at base).
There is only a $6,184 spread between the starting salary of our lowest and
highest level library family classification (a family of six levels). This compression has
begun to erode the quality and quantity of our applicant pools as employees see little
reason to seek promotion for a negligible salary increase. Our turnover rate in FY05 was
28%. Salary is the number one reason given for leaving a position in the Libraries. This
year, we worked with master’s students from an Applied Psychology class to study
compensation issues in the libraries. What we discovered from this exercise is that staff
are satisfied with their work, with the organization, and with how their values mesh with
the Libraries; however, their intent to leave the Libraries was ranked high due to the
salary levels.
To begin to address the job classification salary issues, we have worked with
University Human Resources to propose a new salary structure for the six library job
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classification titles. While the proposed salary minimums still fall below what we would
like them to be, we think that this will begin to address the problem.
To summarize, our accomplishments in this area for the past year were to study
the issue, conduct a survey of staff, develop a new salary structure, and to consider ways
to further improve working conditions. However, all of this is lieu of the real need,
which is to increase salaries.
Expand and Improve Available Space

Remodel Main and Science Library Entry Floors. While the Student Learning Center
is proving to be an attraction for students and potential students, a recent survey
found that students are put off by the appearance of the Main and the Science
libraries. MRR requests have been submitted to improve the appearance of the entry
floors of these two buildings, but funding has not yet been provided. Recent
renovations at other institutions, notably Georgia Tech, have resulted in increased use
and satisfaction of older library space.

Special Collections Libraries Building. This building is currently 16th on the Board
of Regents List of Major Capital Projects. It should move to 12th after the budget for
FY2007 is finalized.

Collection Storage. Shelving in the Main and Science Libraries is very tight. The
Library Repository provides overflow shelving, but it will be full in a few years. The
Special Collections Libraries Building will resolve this problem, but it could be three
to five years or longer before it is complete.
Assessing Effectiveness
Last year, the Libraries participated in LibQUAL+™, a survey instrument
developed by the Association of Research Libraries that provides qualitative benchmarks.
Because the survey is conducted at a large number of academic libraries, it provides a
context for examining the perceptions of our own students and faculty with their
counterparts at other institutions. While we ranked in the top third of participating ARL
research libraries in terms of overall library service quality to users, the results indicated
that is difficult for any library to keep pace with the rapid growth of the electronic
resources.
LibQUAL+™ indicated that users want two things: more electronic resources
and greater ease of use of those resources. Reflection suggests that these two issues are
actually two sides of the same issue. The surge in electronic resources available to
libraries and offered to users has outstripped our ability, or the ability of any library, to
organize and present them in a coherent and readily understandable fashion. While
students and faculty expect the ease of Google, the electronic databases, journals, books,
and other resources we offer are very complex and do not work well with simple, stripped
down searching.
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The results of LibQUAL+™ have led us to acquire software solutions that attempt
to organize and present these very complex databases to our users. Three of these
solutions will illustrate this approach:
 Google Scholar – This search engine focuses on more scholarly resources on the
Web and we have begun to feature it prominently on the Libraries' web site in
hopes that students and faculty will use it rather than the more general Google
when beginning scholarly research.
 Federated Searching – This is software that conducts a search across many
databases at one time. In cooperation with GALILEO, we have begun to use
software called WebFeat to explore how well this concept works. A more
sophisticated package, MetaLib, is also being tested.
 Bibliographic Management Software – With funding from the Student
Technology Fee, we have licensed software that allows the capture and
organization of bibliographic citations. For example, a student working on a
term paper can conduct a search for articles and use this software to organize
and save the citations into a personal database. The software also allows the
student to format footnotes and bibliographies.
It should be noted that we will conduct a second round of LibQUAL+™ in Fall
2006.
In addition to LibQUAL+™, the Libraries undertook other surveys and
assessments, including an extensive survey of users of the Student Learning Center.
These studies can be accessed at the Libraries' Assessment Steering Committee's web site
at: http://www.libs.uga.edu/assessment/
wgp
4/3/2006