CASE:  ROYAL ROADS UNIVERSITY
(CANADA)

Based on an interview with librarian Dana McFarland [McFarland]

When Royal Roads Military College closed in 1995 and re-opened as Royal Roads University, the library was in desperate need of a makeover. The Military college had about 100,000 books appropriate to a liberal arts undergraduate university. The new university would be mostly graduate degrees and certificates in the relatively narrow field of business with most students using the distance education program.

The new university mandate “entirely changed the mandate for the library,” says librarian Dana McFarland by telephone from Victoria. It was to be “a new university library serving a new suite of programs and a new model.” Distance education was the main format for teaching courses. The military college had no online resources.

Coronel Memorial Library at Royal Roads University
Courtesy of Royal Roads University

The university joined ELN (B.C.’s Electronic Library Network) and COPPUL (Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries) to develop its own online resources, and network with other libraries for development of an Interlibrary Loan system.

The military college had left its collection intact, so one of the library’s first tasks was weeding the collection. They sent 30,000 books back to the Department of National Defence: books on subjects “we’d never offer programs in.”

One of the biggest tasks was the retrospective conversion of the military library, shelved according to the Dewey system, into the Library of Congress system. It took five years.

The military college used most of its floorspace for shelving. It had little study space and no computer lab.  Once these two needs were accommodated, shelf space was lost and had to be added elsewhere.

The library established a contract with Blackwell’s to order the books that faculty deemed essential to the new graduate research library.

With the turnover of the library came extensive renovations to the building built in 1874. “We repurposed a number of spaces,” including reading space and staff offices. The building was also recarpeted and sound baffling was installed.

 

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