From the University Librarian

The Commons Computer Lab in Ekstrom Library, funded by Metropolitan College/UPS is now open for business. Also available are six new group study rooms in Ekstrom Library on the 3rd and 4th floors.

The Web of Science allowing access to the Science, Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities Citation Indexes will be available for the campus community as of February 1. UofL will be the first state institution to provide this access. Training for using this wonderful resource will be made available.

We are finalizing a contract to catalog our government document collection. The Government Publications staff has already begun the complicated profiling process.

We have finally signed the contract with Ovid for access to medical databases (AIDSLine, BioethicsLine, CancerLit, CINAHL, HealthStar and Medline) and will work on including psychology databases soon.

The Collaborative Learning Center has been completely updated to accommodate state of the art teaching techniques and electronic access.

The new director for the Commonwealth Virtual Library (CVL) is Miko Pattie. Several Requests for Proposal are in the process of being submitted by the CVL for statewide access to electronic databases and document delivery service. The CVL Information Literacy Committee, which I chair, will be working with a consultant from COLLEGIS (Founded in 1986, COLLEGIS is the leading provider of information technology solutions and services to colleges and universities nationwide) to prepare four web-based information literacy modules for the Commonwealth Virtual University (CVU) pilot programs. A new Faculty Development Group has been named to prepare the faculty for the selected pilot programs for web-based teaching. I have been selected to be a part of this group and hope to help integrate information literacy into the courses for the pilot programs. The courseware selected for training faculty to teach web courses is from COLLEGIS and intensive training for that will take place in the next few weeks.

During the next several weeks we will be involved in faculty and staff evaluations, FY 99-00 budget preparations and most importantly, a review of progress with our strategic plan.

A two-year progress report for the Libraries will be available soon. The report documents the fact that much progress has been made in the Libraries. You should all be very proud of our many achievements during this period because it is the result of your hard work and dedication.

--Hannelore Rader