While you were away the librarians were very busy, as usual, looking for ways to stretch our budget and to provide more resources the way YOU want them–online and right to your desktop. We made a lot of progress on that this year and will be flipping the great majority of our paper titles to electronic so you can access them from anywhere. Some of this won’t take affect til the end of the year, but it is coming and it is great news.
Even better news is that we have canceled the last of our microform subscriptions and will be getting those electronically as well. We will still have some older titles only in microform but we are slowly phasing out our collection and will be relying more heavily on electronic. The funds that were used to cover these will be diverted to cover the cost of the electronic titles.
You will be happy to know as well that we now have Science and Nature available. While these are so basic to many areas of study at Bradley, we have been hesitant to add as they are very expensive and we did not have the money. By flipping to electronic and canceling microforms, we were able to divert funds to cover these titles.
Why, you may ask, was this not done sooner? Well for a variety of reasons including cost, availability, and resistance to change. I think everybody, students and faculty, are all on the same page now and we can finish our move in the direction of electronic access to many, if not most, of our critical resources.
