Concept Paper: Revisited

The Concept Paper was drafted in May of 1995.
The Reality is of September 2001.

The Concept:
The Agricultural Information Center will be the human interface on the information highway and serve as a hub in an information system that will include the W.T. Young Library and beyond. The facility will incorporate some traditional library functions with an active training program in the use of electronic resources in the field of agriculture. Included in the Center will be a microcomputer lab, current periodicals area and reading room with a small working ready reference collection, individual carrels, group study and meeting rooms, and a staff area.

The Reality:
The Agriculture Library is being slowly transformed into the Agricultural Information Center (AIC). The renovation of this center was accomplished by partnering with other areas. The Dean of the College of Agriculture funded the infrastructure costs for the Center and Information Systems funded the infrastructure for the microcomputing lab. Construction was kept to a minimum with only the walls of the new reading room and a wall for the staff areas being constructed. Landscape furniture was located through the Federal Surplus system and since the majority of our resources support research, the AIC qualified to receive the furniture. The furniture provided for the groups study areas and the office areas as well as the training room. The libraries paid for the transportation and installation of the furniture. In the end, a training room was created out of existing space with the equipment funded by a Council of Post Secondary Education Grant and a meeting room will also be provided with the training room. The only area not constructed was the individual carrels but carrels were placed in the reading room and provide quiet space for the graduate students. A bonus was the addition of a wireless network and a student laptop loan program that was originally funded through information systems.

The Concept:
The staff of the Center will provide the guidance and expertise necessary to function well in today's complex information system. The training area will be used to work with clients to provide instruction in the information sources appropriate to their needs. Assistance will be given to students to enable them to find their resources efficiently and to train them to become knowledgeable library users. The training emphasis for faculty and staff will be on how to access information sources from the desk top. The general public could also be served on site or indirectly through their local library using the technology.

The Reality:
Training is an important component of the AIC. As of October 1, 2001 our training room is not ready for occupancy but training has been held using other facilities. GEN 100 and 200 sessions continue to reach the majority of our undergraduate population. The In-Service has expanded to 28 half day sessions with many of them being held in various areas around the state. One-on-one training continues to go on into the facility.

The Concept:
Center staff will monitor developing products and provide training seminars to faculty and staff. They will serve as a resource in accessing products both on and off campus, and assistance in interfacing the electronic system from office or home will be available. Training Cooperative Extension personnel to tap into and effectively use the system from their counties will be provided in a more aggressive manner. Training opportunities for research personnel in off campus facilities will be more intensive.

The Reality:
Much of the service activity in the center revolves around training. Valerie Perry did 28 training sessions out in the state for our off campus faculty and staff. Part of that training includes proxy access to our library materials. Training sessions have been held for faculty and graduate students but will become more intensive once our training room is finished. Plans are being made for training in Biological Sciences as well and AIC staff continue to be active in training GEN 100 and 200 students.

The Concept:
Agriculture Information Center staff will continue to select library materials in the subject of agriculture and continue to interact closely with the College of Agriculture in order to keep abreast of agricultural information needs at the University and through out the state. Products and services will be developed in the Center to further this effort.

The Reality:
The staff of the AIC select and order library materials in the life sciences excluding medicine and the social sciences with an agricultural emphasis. We also began adding videos and other electronic products at the request of our users. Recently we began offering a new books list through our website and continue to develop our website to provide for agricultural information needs.

The Concept:
Features of the proposed facility include a microcomputer lab to allow electronic access to programs, teaching aids, library products, and Internet resources. Included in the lab will be an interactive electronic classroom. Students will be able to work on projects between classes or to gather sources of information for an assignment. Course reserve materials will also be available.

The Reality:
The micro computing lab was completed in Dec. of 1999 and the interactive classroom is nearing completion. Student use is high during the day when classes are in session and moderate in the evening. Course reserves continue to be offered but have been dwindling with the use of web sites and the many electronic journals we now offer.

The Concept:
A traditional reading room will provide seating and a small browsing area of current journals and a small working collection to provide quick, ready reference. It will be an inviting space that will be conducive to studying and contemplation. Additional individual carrels will provide a quiet environment and be equipped with network connections to serve the needs of the graduate students. The group study/meeting rooms also will have network connections and will be able to access the Young Library's media distribution system.

The Reality:
The reading room has materialized as envisioned with current issues of 260 journals remaining in the Center (about 10% of our current subscriptions). Draperies were removed and plants added to the area to make it more inviting and it is an enforced quiet area. Network connections were not provided as a wireless network was installed and connections were not needed. The group study areas are also able to access the wireless network. The media distribution system did not materialize so in order to compensate, a video collection is being built.

The Concept:
The current facility opened in 1964 to meet the needs of the College of Agriculture. Departmental collections were consolidated to reflect the interdependency of subjects in the science. Today, the agricultural researcher must use materials from all areas of science and the student in agriculture must be able to keep abreast of current issues as well as use resources in many disciplines. Teaching has moved from strict discipline tracks to general issues based courses as a preliminary to subject specialty. Students are required to use traditional library resources, electronic resources, and work together to discuss, write and communicate what they have found. Graduate students and faculty need access to the traditional library materials as well as electronic resources and services. Training in all areas is required to prepare our students to go out into an information based society and to help our faculty, staff, graduate students, and extension personnel keep up within their various areas. Todays information system requires interaction with traditional books and a number of computer systems world wide.

The reality:
This need has not changed and the AIC facilitates both the use of books materials (by delivering books out of Young Library) and has been aggressive in increasing our holdings in electronic journals.

The Concept:
Renovation of the Agriculture Library to the Agricultural Information Center would begin in the summer of 1997. Book materials would be moved to the Young Library and the book stacks and wall removed. The construction would begin on the microlab training room and group study rooms for completion in the fall semester of 1997. Work would then begin on the staff offices and the reading room with moving of the service desk between the fall and spring semesters of 1997/98. Work would then begin on the private carrels and would be completed by the end of spring semester 1998. The renovation would be completed by July 1, 1998.

The Reality:
Renovation actually began in the summer of 1999. The move was delayed by a year and then asbestos had to be removed from the facility. Work began on the microcomputing lab but the rest of the work was done piecemeal and not on any schedule. As of October 2001 the facility still is not finished with one room still requiring renovation.

The Concept:
The Agriculture Library occupies 9845 square feet in the Agricultural Science Building under wet laboratories. The space is well located for public access and use by students but not conducive to the storage of valuable library collections. The emphasis of the space is on storage of and access to a valuable agricultural collection. The book collection occupies 75% of the current space, staff areas 10% of the space and reader space occupies 15% of the facility. In 1985, a reading room was constructed to afford some measure of quiet in the facility. The reading room is a mixture of books stacks and tables and is separated from the desk area by a wall. The lobby area of the library houses six work stations that provide access to various electronic products and has the information desk where reference services and circulation are provided. The reference collection is in one section of the reading room. Microform equipment and the VCR are at the back of the library. The Agriculture Library currently employs 13 FTE of staff.

The Reality:
The Agricultural Information Center occupies the same amount of space as the Agriculture Library. The books now occupy about 5 % of the space and the staff, 25% of the space. The rest of the space is allocated to people space. The lobby area provides for 6 workstations with space for expansion, video and laser disk equipment and the satellite downlink for Acres USA. The print collection is primarily housed in the reading room with some reference tools and reserve materials housed in the lobby area. The current staff of the AIC including the Morris Library and Information Center is 9.83 FTE.

The Concept:
The primary service group for the Agriculture Library are the faculty, staff, and students both on and off campus of the College of Agriculture. The Agriculture Library also fills the agricultural information needs of the rest of the University of Kentucky campus and because of its Land Grant mission, the Commonwealth of Kentucky as a whole.

The Reality:
This is unchanged.

The Concept:
The Agriculture Library offers a wide array of services. We currently circulate books, answer reference questions, develop the electronic information components for the general courses, offer subject specific information literacy training on demand, provide electronic bibliographic access on site and training for using sources off site, offer course reserve, do materials selection, provide document delivery for off campus materials, act as a liaison between Communications Services and the Computing Center for our clientele, and provide tables of contents of journals to e-mail boxes. The Agriculture Library provides technical services support in cataloging and acquisitions to the Biological Sciences Library. There is also an information service in the Gluck Equine Research Center.

Most of the current services would continue. Responsibility for the technical support for the book collections in Agricultural and Biological Sciences collections would go to Young Library. Materials selection and order function would remain with the Agricultural Information Center as well as the technical support for the electronic products and services. Training would be expanded in the undergraduate curriculum to move beyond the general courses. Integration of information into the courses would also be done with the capstone courses in the College of Agriculture. Course reserve would remain in the facility with book materials being borrowed from other libraries. Articles would be scanned into a datafile and these articles could be accesses from any networked computer workstation. Technical support would be offered in helping clienteles interface from Agriculture to the mainframe and for our extension offices around the state and other off campus clients. Support would also be offered for Geographical Information Systems by identifying spatial files and creating access to them. Support would also be given to electronic products developed by the College of Agriculture. Support to extension personnel would be broadened and access to electronic files of particular interest to extension would be incorporated into the electronic collection. A description of the services of the Agriculture Library and proposed services of the Agricultural Information Center appears in Appendix I.

The reality:
Services existing in July 1998 still exist and additional services have been added. The materials ordering and technical support for electronic products have remained with the AIC as well as some of the technical services. Training for the undergraduate students has been through GEN 100/200 but a plan has been devised to work with the capstone instructors to moved beyond the general sources. Course reserve has diminished due to different teaching practices but continues to be offered. Our support for GIS has not materialized. We have begun developing an extension page for our website to pull together electronic sources for our extension personnel.

The current facility would be converted to client space as opposed to book space. All stacks and walls would be removed and the existing space would be divided into six functional areas. The microlab space would occupy approximately 2400 square feet of space in the southwest quadrant of the library. Approximately 600 square feet of this space would be allocated for a training area which would be open for student use when not in use for training. Group study rooms would occupy approximately 900 square feet along the south wall of the quadrant. Individual carrel and locker space would be provided along the north wall of this quadrant.

The Reality:
This was mostly done. The training room was placed in part of the area designated for individual carrels and group study space was placed in the area designated for the training room. There is no locker space.

The northeast quadrant of the existing facility would be allocated to the reading room and lobby space. Approximately 1700 square feet of space along with windows of the east side of the facility would be furnished with a mixture of lounge and traditional library furniture and would be an enforced quiet area. The lobby space would include copiers, microform equipment, lounge furniture, and dedicated NOTIS terminals. The service desk would be at the west end of this area.

The Reality:
This was done.

Staff space would occupy the southwest quadrant of the facility with access to all areas and to the outside for movement of equipment. The space would provide work space for all staff as well as a common area and space to house and work on equipment. A map of the proposed facility appears in Appendix II. A description of the current and of the proposed staffing and functions appears in Appendix III.

The Reality:
This was done.