| Illinois Natural History Survey Library |
2010 no. 32 |
| Library Profile |
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| What is unique about your library?
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The Illinois Natural History Survey celebrated its 150th
anniversary in 2009. Throughout
the Survey's history it has maintained and supported the library. Due to this support the library has a
well developed collection that specializes in Illinois natural history and the
biological sciences. The INHS
library is also a departmental library with the Main Library at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and enjoys the benefits other
departmental libraries receive such as a materials budget, cataloging services,
and binding and preservation services.
The INHS library materials are included in the Main Library's
on-line catalog. The collection contains over 70,000 books and bound journals. Many of the journal runs span from
volume one to the present. The
library also houses a number of special collections including the INHS photograph
collection, Illinois Wetlands Maps, INHS Technical Reports
and INHS Staff Bibliography archives (online and print), rare books, archival materials, and some
unique water colors and prints. |
| What are the primary goals and objectives of your library? |
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| What cooperative efforts are you currently doing? |
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| Tell us a story about your library. |
Each year the INHS library accepts a large number of book donations
and the duplicate books and journals are stored until we have enough materials
gathered for a “book giveaway”.
These “book giveaway” events occur every few years and are a great way
to promote the library. We
invite Survey/Institute staff and graduate students to the library for donuts
and cider and offer the duplicate gift books and journals for their use and
enjoyment. It is a very popular
event. Last November our book
giveaway took an unusual turn.
Shortly after the event ended we heard that an enterprising graduate
student was selling some of the books we had given away on eBay. We had to acknowledge that times are
changing and that we should probably reassess this event. |
| If money were no object, what services would you add? |
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| When we moved to our new space in the South Research Park in
2005 the library was large enough to house the INHS photograph collection. The INHS has over 24,000 historic
photographs, maps and drawings. A
group within the survey was formed and they developed an in-house, on-line
database to serve as a finding aide that includes information about many of
these photographs. If we had
unlimited funds we could purchase the necessary equipment and hire help
to
further develop this resource by managing the image database, scanning
the
existing photograph collection, adding new materials from survey
scientists, having the database go live and filling requests for images
from scientists
and the public. |
| What is popular in your library? |
Consulting with a librarian is the most popular reason why
people visit or contact the library.
The most popular collections found in the library include the new book
shelf, the new journal issues shelf, INHS publications (Bulletin, Biological Notes,
Special Publications, Technical Reports, Circular), the Illinois
Wetlands maps, the Illinois Nature Preserves Committee meeting information, and
the INHS photograph collection. |
| How does your library use online tools to connect to your users? |
| A new INHS library webpage was launched November 2008 which included an on-line chat module, a library email account, and online forms for purchase suggestions and reference questions. We post information to a library news blog with a feed to our website which contains information about the library system and other important resources. Journal issues that are received daily are blogged and linked to online content (if available) for scientists and individuals unable to physically visit the library. We display new books and have a link to the new book list on the INHS library website. For requested literature searches we use the RefWorks "shared folders" feature to send researchers the results from detailed searches on various topics and help them set up saved searches and citation alerts in various literature databases. The affiliation with the University Library has made possible the digitization of INHS/IDNR publications and technical reports, and other select materials that are available in Illinois Harvest, IDEALS (the University repository, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. |
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Request a visit to your library Library of the Week Executive Director: Jan Ison, Editorial and Design Team: Michelle Ralston and David Lottes |
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