Around the World to Ankara, Turkey and Middle East Technical University Library: Modernization and Innovation

Citation

Karasözen, B. (2003), "Around the World to Ankara, Turkey and Middle East Technical University Library: Modernization and Innovation", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2003.23920caf.003

Around the World to Ankara, Turkey and Middle East Technical University Library: Modernization and Innovation

Bülent Karasözen

Middle East Technical University (METU) is one of Turkey's premier state-financed institutions of higher education. Founded in 1956 to serve not only Turkey but also the region, English was adopted as the language of instruction in recognition of the need for highly trained graduates in the sciences and technical fields, to advance the development of Turkey and other countries in the region. Today, METU's modern campus, equipped with the most advanced scientific and technical facilities, serves around 19,000 students with more than 1,000 academic personnel. It has 35 undergraduate programs within five faculties and 71 graduate programs. Currently 23 percent of METU's student population is enrolled in either Master's or Doctoral programs.

The METU Computer Center offers all its students and faculty access to up-to-date computing and networking resources. The campus computing environment is made up of departmental networks connected to a campus-wide back-bone using ATM technology on its 31 central servers. Students have access though the 30 PC labs to Internet and online resources.

METU Library (www.lib.metu.edu.tr/) covers an area of 12,058m2 with its eight reading- and two meeting-halls. The library provides 750 simultaneous sitting places for users. There are 480,000 publications overall, of which 331,000 are books and 149,000 are bound periodicals. METU Library expended a lot of effort in the last ten years to modernize its collections and user services. The main goals toward a modern library are:

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  broadening and improving the access’to electronic information sources;

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  helping students and faculty to learn to use the library more effectively, so as to strengthen the role of the library in information literacy; and, to achieve these goals;

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  recruiting qualified staff and performing continuous training for its librarians.

The Library continues to build an electronic library by extending and integrating online access to library resources and services. The journal collection was re-organized, and now METU users have access to more than 9,500 electronic journals of major publishers compared with 1,600 print journals. Currently, the Library provides online access to users within the Campus to 12 full-text electronic journal, eight bibliographic and four reference databases, and one electronic book collection. Parallel with the collection development efforts, user instruction has become more important. University graduates and faculty should learn to determine the nature and extent of information needed, be able to access it effectively and efficiently, and use it to accomplish specific purposes.

The Library makes use of the latest technological developments in providing automated services to its users. There are currently 138 PCs within the library, 48 of which are open for library users. The Library uses an international automation system, VTLS, consisting of cataloguing, circulation and reporting modules. Access to the Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) is possible through the terminals that are in the Library and also from any other place that has Internet connectivity. Our users utilize the OPAC heavily. Access to OPAC has doubled every year since the introduction of the library automation system in 1995. In 2002 the total number of OPAC searches was about 1,000,000. The library automation system will be upgraded this year to Virtua, a new version of the VTLS system.

In 1995, the Library established a campus-wide CD-ROM server and network to provide access to various databases. The CD-ROM network has been used very heavily since its introduction. Owing to the technological changes and the move to electronic databases on the Internet, the CD-ROM databases are being used less frequently now. All databases formerly on the CD-ROM network have been converted to online access, so the Library decided to stop the CD-ROM services this year. There is also a Multi-Media Laboratory in the Library, containing more than 1,000 book and periodical CDs and 13 PCs, which provide access to online databases, electronic journals, and the Internet.

OBES (Collective Document Delivery Service) is a new document delivery service, which includes METU Library and three other libraries in Ankara. METU provides about 6,000 articles per year to other universities in Turkey via OBES.

Consortia building

Owing to the efforts in consortia building and electronic licensing, the librarians have been more and more involved in recent years in handling license agreements, calculating economic implications and evaluating user statistics for various database trials. The Anatolian University Libraries Consortium (ANKOS) (www.lib.metu.edu.tr/ankos/) was initiated in 2000 by METU with 12 other libraries for common access to three databases. The basic premise behind ANKOS is to provide modern information resources for Turkish university and research libraries more efficiently and at a lower cost per institution through cooperation. The number of participating universities and research institutions increased rapidly in the following years, in 2001 to 39 members and 11 databases and in 2002 to 58 members and 16 databases. In 2003, ANKOS has 78 members, covering almost all Turkish universities and research institutions and giving access for 650,000 faculty and students to 25 databases. Among them are ScienceDirect, Springer, Wiley, Kluwer, Institute of Physics, American Computing Machinery, EbscoHost, Blackwell, Gale, Proquest, and OVID full-text e-journal databases and Web of Science, MathScinet and Engineering Village abstracting and indexing databases.

ANKOS has a nine-member Steering Committee, which is responsible for policy-making, strategic planning related to licensing new databases, opening database trials and negotiating with suppliers, and the overall organization of the consortium. The METU Library hosts the ANKOS Web site and the ANKOS Center, consisting of three METU Library staff who carry out the daily work and correspondence among the ANKOS Member libraries.

ANKOS has changed the Turkish library scene very rapidly. The Turkish university libraries were suffering from insufficient budgets, and the overall print subscriptions of all Turkish libraries were lower than 5 percent for major publishers' journals. The consortium affords all universities, regardless of their size of population and collections, access to a vast amount of scientific, technical and medical information. The information provision has improved at all universities, especially at the smaller and new ones with low budgets. The usability of the material and search potential have improved significantly. In 2001, there were 1,350,000 full-text downloads. For 2002, it is estimated at about 1,900,000.

Since 2001, ANKOS has organized annual meetings in which many publishers, librarians from library consortia in other countries, and Turkish librarians participate. ANKOS is a member of ICOLC (International Coalition of Library Consortia) and regularly participates in the meetings of e-ICOLC. In 2002, ANKOS joined SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) to promote SPARC in Turkey and is now planning possible SPARC-related projects. A very recent development is the effort of consortia in Southern Europe to form a regional consortium among Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey, called SELL (Southern European Libraries Link) (www.heal-link.gr/SELL/). SELL's aim is to come together to negotiate regional deals for selected products, where there is mutual interest and where combining our limited resources will give us more leverage in dealing with big publishers and resolving issues of common concern.

ANKOS provides all Turkish university and research libraries with information about new electronic products, consortium offers, and license agreements and organizes trials for new databases and electronic journal collections. For this purpose a Turkish national site licensing model, created in 2002, is used for negotiations with publishers. The main areas of ANKOS activities are setting up trials for electronic resources offered by publishers, evaluating the consortial offers, negotiating license agreements with publishers, and organizing international conferences and training seminars. ANKOS also provides information to the Turkish library community about recent developments in worldwide consortia activities, collection management, Internet resources, digital libraries and scholarly communication.

"Performance budgeting" project

METU Library was selected as the first library in Turkey for the assessment program "Public Expenditure and Institutional Review Project" by the World Bank and the Turkish Ministry of Finance. In 2002, METU Library prepared the mission and vision statements, completed a SWOT (strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats) analysis, set the project aims, and drew up action plans. The aims of the Library within this "Performance budgeting" project are to:

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  provide the METU faculty and students with access to electronic information resources;

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  develop, organize and preserve collections for optimal use;

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  provide services, including instruction for information literacy and information management;

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  provide resources and services to users from other institutions and to METU alumni;

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  improve the physical conditions and provide a modern working environment within the library; and

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  improve the organizational and administrative structure.

To achieve these aims, the Library decided to implement the following action plans:

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  Providing user education and Web management.

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  Digitizing Master's and Doctoral theses.

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  Extending the e-journal and e-reference’collections.

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  Building an e-book and e-reserve collection.

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  Improving the print book collection.

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  Building a depository library.

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  Improving the physical and technical conditions.

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  Improving and increasing the efficiency of the library workflow.

The changes in library operations and services require new staff qualifications, competencies and attitudes. Therefore, investment in education and training is a very important part of the "Performance budgeting" project. In collaboration with the University of Bournemouth in the UK, a training program for the usage of electronic resources, called "Teaching myself," was conducted in September 2002. A training course for digitization of Master's and Doctoral theses was also given with the aim of joining the NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations) with the University of Cincinnati in April 2003.

The most important part of the "Performance budgeting" project is setting up performance indicators and the budget for the next five years according to these criteria. The library expenditures and services will be evaluated in the next years accordingly. Therefore, the Library focused on assessment in 2002 by orienting towards Libqual, E-metrics and ISO 11620 library performance standards. In 2001 a sample survey among students was conducted with the aim of conducting a full survey focused on faculty, graduate students and undergraduates. The usage of all electronic databases, book borrowing, and the Library Web site is being evaluated. The Library has put a lot of effort into building a Web site for its users to navigate the Web. The Web usage statistics in 2002 reveal that 40 percent of users were external users, which shows the popularity of METU Library.

The library staff was actively involved in seminars and conferences in and outside the country, giving presentations about the latest changes in the METU Library as well as project and consortia issues. In 2002, 19 librarians attended several seminars and conferences and made 11 presentations.

METU Library has been a member of IATUL (International Association of Technological University Libraries) since 2002, and it will host the annual IATUL Conference, which will be held in Ankara on June 2-5, 2003 (www.lib.metu.edu.tr/iatul03/).

Bülent Karasözen (bulent@metu.edu.tr) is Director of Libraries, Middle East Technical University Library, Ankara, Turkey.