Library expands access to research materials

With the College’s new membership this month in the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), students will have access to a plethora of research material comparable to top universities through the Inter Library Loan (ILL) program.

“We now have access to this enormous research library,” said Library and Information Services (LIS) Director of Research and Collection Services Terry Simpkins.

CRL, a partnership of over 240 university, college and independent research libraries based in Chicago, specializes in “materials that are not usually held in libraries across the country,” Simpkins said.

According to the CRL website, these materials include 800,000 doctoral theses and 16,000 newspaper titles, many of which are from outside the U.S. CRL also houses a collection of over 30,000 academic journals in foreign languages.

“This stuff is for serious research,” said Simpkins. “Primary sources, a lot of primary sources.”

LIS announced the College’s membership in the partnership on its blog on Nov. 12, expressing confidence that the materials made available will prove a “valuable resource” for students and faculty alike.

Jia Liu ’11, who works at the circulation desk at the Davis Family Library, had not yet heard of CRL but expressed enthusiasm for what it will offer. Bente Madison ’11, who had trouble finding sources for her architecture thesis, also expressed excitement about the announcement.

Accessing CRL resources does not involve any new steps. Library patrons simply follow the normal steps for filling out an ILL request. CRL will be one of the first choice libraries for ILL requests because it has a number of advantages.

“They have longer loan periods,” said Simpkins. “And if you want 300 rolls of micro film, they will let you borrow 300 rolls of microfilm. It’s pretty amazing.”

The membership will cost the library about $20,000 over the next three years, in part thanks to a ‘three for two’ year introductory discount. A portion of the initial three-year contract was subsidized by a grant from Dean of the Faculty Jim Ralph. After three years, the library will review the membership and evaluate its cost-effectiveness based on usage statistics.

However, Simpkins indicated that this new investment in resources does not signal the end of LIS’s recession-era budget. Even before adjusting for inflation, the budget is lower than it was five years ago. In addition to the cutbacks in library hours and the introduction of a fee-based printing system for students last year, Simpkins said that LIS continues to look for ways to save money.

“We buy fewer books,” he said. “We discontinue journals that don’t get used. Right now we’re considering an e-book model, which functions similar to the way you access journal articles.”

The idea, said Simpkins, is to “have access to a bunch of things that we don’t own” and then be able to purchase an item only when someone at the library uses it.

Yet despite budget constraints, LIS was encouraged over the past year by members of the faculty to expand access to rare research materials.

“We have to support senior theses and other high-level research that the students are doing,” said Simpkins. “And the faculty here, they have a very high pedigree in terms of their academic background. They come from top-notch [institutions] with huge research libraries. And they come to Middlebury and we can’t support them in the same way that Stanford or the University of Illinois or Harvard can.”

This certainly is the experience for many faculty members.

“[I was] used to a huge R-1 university that had every single book that I needed,” said Visiting Instructor of Spanish Giannina Reyes Giardiello, who recently left the University of Wisconsin-Madison to teach at the College. Reyes Giardiello is writing her dissertation on representations of masculinity in Mexico in the revolutionary period and in the nineties. For her research, she relies on “history and movies and also documentaries and advertisements from the 19th century,” precisely the types of materials that are available through the CRL.
“The College library is very small,” she said. “But the first thing I found out about was NExpress and that was very useful. But then they told me about [CRL] and it’s awesome because all of the things that I was used to having in Madison … now I have them here.”

As with the previous ILL system, resources from CRL can take up to a week to be processed, packed and received by the College. Still, teachers like Reyes Giardiello want students to take advantage of the service.

“Now that I’m teaching Spanish 300 next semester, I’m planning to take my students to one of the [intro CRL] workshops [offered by LIS],” Reyes Giardiello said. “It is amazing that a college this size … has the resources that it has.”