September kept us busy with the new semester and many new students arriving on campus and learning their way around the campus and the libraries.

I am finalizing the Libraries' progress report for 1999-2000 and would like to share a few highlights with you. Major accomplishments are listed below:

• Reached the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) statistical benchmarks for the first time with our 1998-99 statistics
• Will be considered for ARL membership in 2002 and will need to prepare for this
• Increased collections by 191,921 volumes to a total of 1,700,846 volumes, this large number is due to the cataloguing of government documents
• Increased collections by 452 journal subscriptions to a total of 14,749 subscriptions
• Implemented electronic reserves
• Integrated government documents into collections and services and provided Web-based access to them
• Provided access to 250 electronic databases accessing more than 15,000 journals, dissertations, newspapers and reference works
• Updated library technology to 550 networked computer workstations for staff and public
• Continued to be a net lender of library materials in Kentucky
• Substantially increased faculty productivity in the area of scholarly publications and presentations
• More than 1,119,160 used the libraries
• 76,310 persons used the Metropolitan College Computer Lab

These are some of the highlights; more information will be available when we finalize our annual progress report.

--Hannelore Rader, University Librarian