CASE: UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN B.C. (CANADA)

Based on an interview with librarian Patricia Appavoo [Appavoo interview]

When Patricia Appavoo became chief librarian to the University of Northern B.C. in 1991, the university had no books and no building. What she did have, however, was a collections budget of $4 million and a picture of what her library would look like when it was built. It would be three years before the library opened its doors to students.

The first thing she needed to do was hire staff. “For the first two or three years I was hiring staff like crazy,” she recalls at an in-person interview in Vancouver. Even before the first book order, “hiring staff is one of the most important things,” she says.

The three-year plan was to collect the books for “the basic first collection, the opening day collection,” upon which the university would then build. The $4 million budget was to include the library’s first computer system. Part of the budget was set aside to add periodical titles which were especially important to the sciences. Because of the university’s remote location, Appavoo was especially interested in the electronic journals.

Although she arrived after the library had been fully designed and she therefore would have no input into the architecture, exterior or interior, she was pleased that the decision had already been made to wire the structure for an electronic library. At the time, she says, there was still debate in the academic library community about the need for the sophisticated wiring essential to providing electronic resources.

Geoffrey R. Weller Library
Courtesy of UNBC

Trouble arrived once faculty began to arrive. “They wanted a library like the one they left,” she says. She had to find ways to reconcile the needs of faculty with what she considered to be the needs of the undergraduates, with the undergraduate collection taking precedence initially. To provide research materials to faculty, she was successful with ways to access materials from other libraries. She joined a consortium of Western Canadian Universities, she was able to bring down the costs of the electronic serials collection by sharing the cost with other academic libraries, and made great use of the new electronic Inter-Library Loan system.

For book purchases, she and her staff identified the parameters of what they would buy: no course-required text books,  everything in English, had to be undergraduate level, had to fall within the subject areas for teaching as “identified from the president’s original game plan.” This meant the purchase of books that fell into specific undergraduate subject areas like Education, English, History, Chemistry and Math. They would buy nothing out of print. “We were in a hurry,” she says, “we didn’t want to waste time looking for out-of-print books.” And she put a cap on the amount she would pay for a single book.

The vendor she used (now out of business) provided book profiles that identified books as undergraduate or graduate level.  She was also aided monthly journals with reviews of new academic books.

In order to begin the collection immediately, Appavoo needed a warehouse space to store the books. Books arrived shelf-ready, and the collection was built inside a warehouse rented by the Director of Finance. 

In a brief 1992 article for Quill & Quire, Appavoo pointed out that although "It would be natural to think tha the major challenge of building a university library collection today would be in selecting and installing all these wonderful new technologies," She had discovered "the major challenge is in finding the right balance between a library collection in traditional paper format and one in technology-based formats, between ownership of information and access to information" [Appavoo Quill & Quire].  She points out that electronic resources are only useful "as long as the technology of electronic transmission is readily available." In northern B.C. in 1992, that was not the case. "The reality in northern B.C. is that high-speed electronic transmission is not readily available across the region. And when such access does become available it will be costly, because of the distances involved." For the time being, she concludes "for some students the best form of information access may continue to be the monograph or periodical article and the best type of document delivery the bus or postal service" [Appavoo Quill & Quire].


 

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