Syracuse University Libraries has issued the white paper “Collections and Space: An Update on Syracuse University Libraries’ Journals Migration Project.” Written by K. Matthew Dames, Roberta Gwilt, Scott Warren and TC Carrier, the report documents the progress on the relocation of print journals to the Syracuse University Libraries Facility (the Facility) on South Campus.
The Syracuse University Libraries Facility
To date, the libraries have transferred more than 100,000 journal volumes from 7,000 titles to the Facility, realizing $1,935,000 in savings over five years. In addition, libraries staff maintain access to stored, lightly used scholarship stored at the Facility by operating the “Library to Go” and “Articles to Go” services, which provide scanned copies of online articles and six-day-per-week delivery of physical materials to campus libraries and offices.
“One of the most crucial issues academic research libraries face today is how to allocate our space portfolio between the often competing demands of personal or group study and shelving of scholarly resources,” says Dames, interim dean of the libraries. “As the libraries continue to collaborate with various campus stakeholders to determine the proper mix between seating and scholarship, we continue to leverage the Facility as a critical asset that helps the libraries become more efficient while affecting access as little as possible.”
Other benefits of the project, which continues through summer 2015, include providing space for new books the libraries have purchased to meet curricular and research needs, improving researchers’ ability to browse print collections and providing planning flexibility to develop new spaces that meet contemporary demands.
The libraries began a multi-year project to transfer bound, print journals from Bird Library to the Facility in May 2014. The Facility, the libraries’ 20,000-square-foot, high-density, climate-controlled scholarship storage vault and processing space on Jamesville Avenue, opened in 2012.
The white paper is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.14305/00-00.rt.2015.1. For more information on the project, contact Scott Warren, interim Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship, at sawarr01@syr.edu or 315-443-8339.
