The Library is taking steps to address these concerns, says Chief Librarian Leslie Weir.
The Library Annex, located in the Ottawa Industrial Park, will open with approximately 30,000 items. It will eventually house some 500,000 items over the next ten years and will allow the library to expand its collection until 2015. Over the next three years, 25 per cent of the existing overall collection will be relocated.
This will free up space for the 30 to 40,000 new holdings that are acquired each year and for additional student study places in all campus libraries, says Weir. “The student space has not been redone in decades. We’re looking for something that will help students be more effective in their studying by meeting their pedagogical and research needs.”
Originally built to serve a student population of 15,000, the library now serves 32,000. “[It] receives 1.3 million visits a year of which 1.1 million are to the Morriset Library alone,” says Weir. “With that many visitors coming to use our services and collections, we need a place for them to sit, and we need space for our collections.”
A consultation process with faculty and students began in late 2005 to determine user needs. The plan is to “identify materials that are less heavily used and where a slight delay in access would not be a detriment,” says Weir. “We will be developing tools that will make items in the annex browseable online.”
There are also concerns about how long it would take to receive materials from the annex. The library’s service plan is based “on the volume of required services, user patterns and the needs of researchers,” says Weir. “Should we need to increase the frequency of deliveries from the annex, we are prepared to do so. There is also nothing from preventing items to returning to an on-campus site should a course or research project require more frequent use.”
The library also hopes to introduce a digitized delivery system whereby digital copies of journal articles or book chapters will be available for printing within hours of a request.
Off-site storage of library materials is a growing trend in many major North American universities. In Ontario alone, Waterloo, Guelph, Toronto, Western, Carleton and York either have or are planning to open off-site facilities.
Frequently asked questions about the annex
