BY MONTE MAXWELL

WVU Libraries has begun one of the final stages in the completion of the Downtown Library Complex.

During the next few weeks, the West Virginia and Regional History Collection, along with 47,000 volumes from the general collection, and libraries faculty and staff will relocate to the renovated Charles C. Wise, Jr. Library.

The process will bring permanently improve services that students and faculty receive, but may cause some temporary inconveniences, officials explained.

At times during the move, some materials may not be immediately available. However, Libraries Dean Frances O’Brien assures users that Downtown Campus Library staff will work diligently to minimize inconveniences.

This move is the second in 12 months for WVU Libraries. Last fall,
workers transported books, periodicals, microfilm, maps, and staff
offices from Wise, the Physical Science Library in Clark Hall and the Maps Library in White Hall to the new Downtown Campus Library.

“Our staff worked very hard to meet patrons’ needs while the collections were in transition,” Dean O’Brien said. “We received very few complaints. I think our users know we’ll always do our best to get them the materials they need.”

Dean O’Brien anticipates another relatively smooth transition this time.

Crews began moving the West Virginia and Regional History
Collection this week, and WVRHC Director John Cuthbert expects to open the doors of the new space on the sixth floor of Wise during the week of Nov. 18 subject to the approval of the fire marshal. The collection and microfilm will be closed during the process.

Access to the archives and manuscripts will be available by appointment through Nov. 23. Portions of the general collection
will be moved during the Thanksgiving break. To assist the
move, the Downtown Campus Library will be closed Nov. 27-30.

The following will be relocated: Appalachian Collection; African
Collection; ORLA Collection; theses and dissertations; National Union Catalog, pre-56 imprints; and books with call numbers beginning with PR and PS.

For more information, contact Carroll Wilkinson, head of access
services, 293-4040 ext. 4011, or Cuthbert, 293-3536.

BY MONTE MAXWELL
WVU LIBRARIES

WVU Libraries has made research a little easier for psychology faculty and students with the addition of PsycARTICLES, an online database of 43 journals from the field.

“It’s the difference between night and day,” psychology professor Stan Cohen said. “The time savings alone will be incredible.”

Before, finding a needed article in one of these journals required going to the Downtown Campus Library, finding and retrieving the journal from the stacks, photocopying the article and repeating the process for each desired article. And then the actual work could begin.

Now, the task simply requires finding a computer with Internet access and clicking a few keys. Students and faculty can access the database, PsycARTICLES, from the WVU Libraries homepage,
http://www.libraries.wvu.edu. It joins WVU Libraries’ collection of more than 10,000 electronic journals.

Cohen expects the online access to benefit psychology students who are often asked to do brief abstracts of journal articles. Rather than a few hundred students racing into the library to grab the same journals, they can read them online from home.

Psychology professor Barry Edelstein finds the ability to do research from his office or home appealing. “You can’t sit in the library all the time and write a manuscript,” Edelstein said.

Both educators see advantages just in the increased access to quality sources. For faculty who subscribe to journals included in the database, the access equals financial savings. PsycARTICLES is a database of full-text articles from journals published by the American Psychological Association, the APA Educational Publishing Foundation, the Canadian Psychological Association, and Hogrefe & Huber. The database includes all material from the print journals from 1988 to the present with the exception of ads and editorial board lists.

If you have some spare time, slip on over to the Downtown Campus Library atrium and check out an exhibit on WVU’s electronic thesis and dissertation program – all to the sounds of roaring jazz and fingersnapping blues.

The exhibit includes both a physical display for traditionalists and an online version for the computersavvy.

The traditional exhibit features a glass display case full of colorful
posters and charts explaining the ETD program. Adjacent to the display case is a computer with links to WVU’s ETD Web site, a multimedia video about the program and information about a global ETD conference in May 2003. The exhibit will remain on display throughout the semester.

“We wanted to increase awareness of the ETD program on campus,” said John Hagen, WVU Libraries’ program coordinator. “We have found that the outside world is aware of the program,
but on campus there are still pockets of people who aren’t.”

In 1998 WVU became the second university to require graduate students to submit theses and dissertations electronically. Since then, the school’s ETD collection on the Web has grown to more than 1,300 documents and been accessed more than 2.1 million times.

The highlight of the ETD display is the online version’s multimedia
video, a homegrown production that features images of WVU ETDs ranging from various works of art to computer models of scientific topics. The video opens to a jazz number recorded several years ago by the WVU Jazz Ensemble and closes with “The Dissertation Blues” by recent WVU doctoral graduate Sally Stephenson.

“It gives you a good flavor of what campus research has to offer,” Hagen said. “We wanted to motivate students to create multimedia works of their own. By showing them what is
possible, it stimulates the creative edge.”

Those who can’t visit the display can view the online versions from
their own computers. The Web site link is http://www.wvu.edu/~thesis/ETD_Kiosk.htm.

The West Virginia University Research Corp. has fulfilled a $1 million commitment to enhance the collection at the WVU Libraries.

John Weete, president of the Research Corp., announced that a
recent payment of more than $73,000 brought the total contribution from the Library Challenge Grant Program to $1 million.

“The West Virginia University Research Corp. has been proud to
contribute to strengthening the library resources and thus provide
additional support for WVU faculty and student researchers and scholars,” said Weete, who is also vice president of research and economic development.

In March 1997, the Research Corp. implemented a program to
spur internal support of the libraries. The Library Challenge Grant
Program promised to match $2 for every $1 contributed by staff or faculty to an endowment established by the WVU Foundation on behalf of WVU Libraries.

Because of the grant, rather than paying the full $5,000 for a library endowment, donors made a fiveyear pledge of $1,334. The remainder came from the Research Corp.

The incentive motivated more than 200 University employees to
step forward to create endowments.

“The Libraries are grateful for the Research Corp.’s support in building these book endowments,” Libraries Dean Frances O’Brien said. “We believe books are important, and library users want a current and useful on-site collection. Continuing journal cost inflation puts a lot of pressure on our budget. If we did not have these book endowments, we would be buying fewer books.”

The WVU Research Corp. is an independent not-for-profit corporation established under the laws of W est Virginia for the purpose of stimulating and supporting research and other scholarly activity at the University. Over the last decade the
corporation has invested several million dollars in supporting individual and team research projects at WVU and in assisting the faculty in acquiring the research equipment they need to execute a highly productive, leading-edge research program.

The WVU Foundation is a private non-profit corporation that generates and provides support for WVU.

BY PAM FRONKO
WVU FOUNDATION

The West Virginia University Foundation will dedicate 771 Scholarship Bricks to serve as the foundation of a Scholars Walk at 11 a.m. Saturday, June 15, at the Downtown Library Complex.

With the Scholarship Brick Walkway, the Foundation and West
Virginia University are recognizingthose donors who have invested inthe lives of WVU students. Each brick is engraved with the name of an endowed scholarship created at the University.

Speakers will include WVU President David C. Hardesty Jr.; WVU Foundation President F. Duke Perry; WVU Foundation Vice President D. Lyn Dotson; WVU student and scholarship recipient Mary Ballard; and scholarship donor Raymond Hinerman Sr.
Ballard, of Charleston, is a sophomorein the WVU Honors Program, majoring in biology. A Presidential Scholar, she is the recipient of the George W. Berry Scholarship, WVU Valedictorian Scholarship, WVU National Merit Scholarship and Charleston Area Medical Center Scholarship.

Hinerman, of Weirton, received his J.D. from the WVU College of Law in 1967. In 1993 he established the Raymond A. and Barbara J. Hinerman Law Scholarship Endowment. He is a partner in the
firm of Hinerman & Fahey. The event is open to the public.

Move over, Book-of-the-Month Club. The WVU electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) collection has been accessed more than 2.1 million times since inception.

Implemented as a requirement in August 1998, the ETD Initiative has several purposes, including helping students promote their careers, assisting learners and researchers within and outside WVU, and making available many scholarly works that were
previously inaccessible.

Notable collection statistics include:

* WVU ETDs are accessed 145,000 times more than their printed counterparts

* There are more than 1,300 documents in the WVU ETD collection

* The most popular WVU ETD has been accessed more than 15,000 times since January 2001

* WVU ETDs are accessed in more than 93 countries

* Access to the WVU ETD research documents has grown at an exponential rate, making it the most popular collection on and off campus

* There are a growing number of interesting WVU ETD multimedia submissions

* More than 70 percent of WVU ETDs are available worldwide on the Web (Note: Campus-restricted ETDs are still available through the Inter-Library Loan program)

* WVU ETDs are transforming West Virginia’s economy by providing research access to the world

Additional program information and collection access can be found at http://www.wvu.edu/~thesis/ or by contacting John H. Hagen, University Libraries, at John.Hagen@mail.wvu.edu.

Historic Display – Harold M. Forbes, associate curator for the West Virginia and Regional History Collection, displays a first folio edition of William Shakespeare’s plays.

See the photo with full caption (PDF).

WHERE GREATNESS IS READ — WVU officials dedicated the new downtown library April 10 in the multistory atrium joining the new building with the Charles C. Wise Jr. Library. Nancy Davenport, a WVU alumna who heads acquisitions at the Library of Congress, was the keynote speaker.

Read the rest of the story (PDF with photos).