Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) and its library: a brief introduction

Citation

Leung, S.W. (2002), "Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) and its library: a brief introduction", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919dad.001

Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) and its library: a brief introduction

Shirley W. Leung

Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) and its library: a brief introduction

Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU), a doctoral degree granting university, is one of eight government funded tertiary education institutions in Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region, China. It comprises the Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Social Sciences, Faculty of Science, School of Business, School of Communication, School of Continuing Education, and newly established School of Chinese Medicine. In the 2001/2002 academic year, it has 5,050 students, 540 full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty, and 900 FTE academic support and administrative staff.

As of 30 June 2001, the HKBU Library's collection included 723,815 bound volumes, 3,942 active serials print subscriptions, and 124 electronic databases (see Figure 1). The language distribution of the collection is about 60 per cent English and 40 per cent Chinese. The staff is made up of 16 professionals and 50 FTE support staff. The library's expenditures for collections, staff, and equipment and general supplies were HK$21,751,163, HK$18,738,814, and HK$6,251,859 respectively[1].

Figure 1 The HKBU Library Collection

The library has been using the INNOPAC System since 1995, after migrating from the Eureka System. In early 1999, the library joined the OCLC system for cataloging and other bibliographic services while discontinuing the use of the Biblofile CD-ROM database. There are 111 public PCs and 81 staff PCs in the library, all with access to the Internet via the university's telecommunications network. A total of 52 of the PCs are equipped with Microsoft Office applications and various self-learning materials such as language and test practice programs; 32 of these are located in a computerized laboratory, which was established as a joint effort with the university's Information Technology Services Center (ITSC) two years ago. It is open to all users whenever it is not scheduled for hands-on bibliographic instruction sessions. In addition to PCs in the library, users may bring in their own laptop computers and access the campus telecommunications network for Internet and other Web-based resources through wireless LAN technology.

Library developments in the past three to four years

In the past three to four years, there has been a continuous effort to implement changes in the HKBU Library with the objective of developing an agile organization, one that is poised to initiate and adopt changes as opportunities and needs may arise. These changes essentially addressed six areas:

1. 1.

   Strengthening library collection development and management efforts.

2. 2.

   Enhancing access to library information resources and services by optimizing information technology and through outreach efforts.

3. 3.

   Improving services and appearance of the library as a physical place.

4. 4.

   Reviewing, refining, and revising library operations and workflow to enhance delivery of user services.

5. 5.

   Developing the library's staffing resources.

6. 6.

   Establishing collaborative efforts with other libraries.

For the purpose of this article, however, the focus will be on some of the library's systems-related and information technology-based efforts. These efforts applied mostly to three areas: collection development, access and reference services, and acquisitions operations.

Collection development efforts

A major initiative was to aggressively develop the library's collection of electronic resources. The total number of databases grew from 54 CD-ROM databases in 1997/1998 to 124 databases, mostly Web-based. The titles subscribed to range from the more general such as Lexis Nexis Academic Universe, EBSCO's Academic Search FullText Elite, ABI Inform, JSTOR, and Project Muse to the more specialized such as Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA), RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, and SportDiscus.

As the number of full-text electronic titles grew through subscription to both stable and unstable aggregated databases, the bibliographic control and access issues soon became a problem. Between the reality of limited staffing resources and the desire to have the titles fully searchable on a title basis through the OPAC as well as through a simple alphabetical title listing on the library homepage, the library developed an Electronic Journal Computerized Program in 2001 through the team effort of staff from Acquisitions, Cataloging, Collection Services, and Systems. This program has made it possible to update titles in large, unstable aggregator databases in a simple, direct, consistent, and accurate manner[2].

Access and reference services initiatives

For access enhancement efforts, an array of forms such as interlibrary loan request form, new books recommendation form, reserve request form, and multimedia group viewing room booking form were put on the library homepage. Some of the forms are online forms and others are downloadable forms. Efforts were further made to place other information resources online for easy access. These included: the digitizing of examination papers so that students may access them at any time and from anywhere; the creation of an online index to our collection of selected faculty and staff publications; and the development of a full-text database of teaching development grants project proposals and reports in collaboration with the university's academic registry.

In the area of reference services, a concerted effort was made to place online various subject user guides. In addition, the library successful applied for a university teaching development grant to create a WebCT-based online tutorial entitled, "Foundations of searching library resources" to facilitate self-paced learning. Two other brand new developments related to access and reference user services were the implementation of an electronic reference service program and participation in the Collaborative Digital Reference Service Program (CDRS) in January 2002.

Acquisitions operations improvement efforts

All technical processing units have undertaken a steady stream of workflow and procedural changes through more optimal use of the INNOPAC system and the OCLC system, but the area that has received the most attention was the interface with the faculty library coordinators concerning acquisitions and collection development efforts.

Although the library has an established program of liaison librarians who serve as resource persons and contacts for the academic departments and units, faculty involvement continues to play a key role in collection development efforts through a network of more than 40 "Library coordinators". As may be expected, the extent of their involvement varies, with some having served as library coordinators for a number of years and others rotating yearly. With this arrangement, some of the library coordinators may have gained a good understanding of collection needs in the subject areas pertaining to their departments and others may have rather vague ideas at best. Given these circumstances, training of the library coordinators is a pressing and recurrent need.

As a solution, the library established a "Library coordinator portal" through which those officially designated as library coordinators as well as other interested individuals (e.g. department heads and deans) may access an array of library information at their convenience such as budget allocation reports, statistical reports, library organization chart, and other information essentially designed to help them work more efficiently and effectively in carrying out their collection development functions. Two other systems-related efforts in this area were to facilitate the selection of titles received on approval plans and from vendor supplied title lists such as form selections.

For the former, library coordinators may review and select approval titles received from YBP and other vendors within a two-week period in their own subject areas according to pre-set profiles. They may carry out this task by reviewing the books physically held in the Acquisitions Section, or they may choose to review the approval plan titles online. Titles selected are automatically placed in a selected list for all library coordinators to see, and titles not selected are merged into a file for anyone else interested to select and recommend for the library collection. While this is not a perfect or ideal approach, the online approval plan selection program[3] has greatly expedited the selection of titles by making it more convenient for library coordinators who would not have time to review the physical books in person. More importantly, it expedites the selection of interdisciplinary titles.

Building on the positive reaction to the online approval plan selection program, the library recently developed an interface between vendor supplied new book title lists and INNOPAC's Web OPAC to facilitate selection, ordering, and collection assessment functions. As librarians involved with the routing of the paper selection lists or forms know, it may take a long time for the lists or slips to be routed from one person to another, not to mention that sometimes the title lists or forms simply get lost. This program allows the library coordinators to review and select the titles supplied by the vendor in list or slip form in subject areas of their own departments as well as in related areas. In addition, this program offers the capability of checking a particular tilte, through HTML links, against the library's Web OPAC in the following fields: author, title, series, Dewey Decimal Number, ISBN, and subject headings. In developing this program, a related collection assessment function was developed to enable the searching and downloading of titles in specific subject areas from another INNOPAC library Web OPAC for checking against the titles in the HKBU Web OPAC to determine which titles are included or missing from the HKBU holdings. More information on this program is available at: http://lib-nt.hkbu.edu.hk/iii/index.htm[4].

Use of homepage for delivering library information resources and services

Like most libraries, the HKBU Library homepage serves as an important vehicle for the delivery to and access of a variety of information resources and services. The current edition of the library homepage made its debut in fall 2000 and a new edition is expected in early 2003. This is in accordance with the library's plan of issuing a new edition every 24-28 months as an effort to stay abreast of new concepts, theories, and tool kits pertinent to the design, creation, and maintenance of the homepage as a means of information and service delivery mechanism.

It was along the same idea of delivering and facilitating access to information resources that the library developed a special Chinese Medicine (CM) homepage in early 2001 in support of the School of Chinese Medicine and its programs (see http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/libcm). This homepage provides information on current events and news items concerning the growth and development of CM – an area that has been designated as a strategic growth direction by the government of Hong Kong. Furthermore, the homepage provides links with annotations to over 200 Internet resources pertaining to CM. They were selected based on a set of criteria as a measure of "quality assurance".

To facilitate communication among the library units and to encourage the adoption of information technology, a staff intranet has been in use for sharing meeting minutes, reports, project results, forms, guidelines and procedures, statistics, and other operational and management information. A new edition of the staff intranet has just been issued with guidelines for responsibilities for updating responsibilities and information retention periods. By involving both professional and support staff in this effort and by taking a distributed approach of building and maintaining the content of the staff intranet, it is hoped that the information technology competency of the library staff will be strengthened over time. The goal is to inculcate a "systems" culture in addition to developing a strong systems capability.

Projects in progress

The library is actively working on several projects at this time:

• •

  The implementation of an electronic reserve program.

• •

  The testing the OCLC Illiad Interlibrary Loan System in partnership with the University of Hong Kong Libraries and the Chinese University of Hong Kong Libraries.

• •

  The planning of the implementation of MetaFrame Application Server Software in September 2002 to enable users to gain remote access to the library's CD-ROM databases from all types of computing devices. (Although the Library prefers to subscribe to Web-based databases, it still has to deal with electronic resources that are only available in CD-ROM format.)

• •

  The implementation of a digitization project of selected files among our large collection of newspaper clippings on China from the 1950s to the mid-1970s as well as some selected special collections.

Summary

The HKBU Library has been on an accelerated path in applying information technology to enhance the delivery and access of library information resources and services. While in part this was necessary to move the library into the twenty-first century, the main objective is to integrate the use of information technology into the library's services and operations. As changes occur in a particular library service area these changes usually have implications for other service areas, either intentionally or unintentionally. Thus, these changes accrue to effect a transformational impact on the organization as a whole over time. The end goal is to develop the HKBU Library into an agile organization through the effective use of information technology as one strategic direction.

Notes

1. 1.

   HK$7.8 is equivalent to US$1.

2. 2.

   For more information, please see Li and Leung (2001).

3. 3.

   Though efforts were made to acquaint the library coordinators with the use of YBP's GOBI System, they generally claimed that it was too complicated.

4. 4.

   The library was recently notified that this program had been selected for the "Most innovative staff modules" award from the Innovative Interfaces, Inc.

ReferenceLi, Y.O. and Leung, S.W. (2001), "Computer cataloging of electronic journals in unstable aggregator databases", Library Resources & Technical Services, October, Vol. 45 No. 4, pp. 198-211.

Shirley W. Leung (sleung@ hkbu.edu.hk) is the University Librarian at Hong Kong Baptist University in Hong Kong.