As the year began, Pilkington Library services were operating in the context of an ongoing review of information services within the University, and in the knowledge that the University Librarian would relinquish his post during the Autumn. The Deputy Librarian's post was vacant, as it had been for the previous ten months. Uncertainty continued throughout the year: as it ended, an appointment to the post of University Librarian had just been made, and a review of all support services within the University was under way. That Library services maintained a high standard during the year, and a number of initiatives was undertaken, reflects great credit on the dedication and professionalism of the Library staff: I am grateful to them all for their work, and for the support given to me as Acting Librarian.

In April the review of information services resulted in the creation of the Division of Information Services and Systems (DISS), bringing together Audiovisual Services, Computing Services and the Library - although the services remain operationally distinct.

Dr David Mack was appointed Director of the Division. The Division was less than four months old at the end of the year, and appointments to the posts of Director of Computing Services and University Librarian were to take effect from 1 August. However, all concerned had already begun to work towards the development of DISS, and looked forward to the University reaping the benefits of closer collaboration between the three services.

Much Library staff time was invested in facilitating preparations for the move of the stock and staff of the Library of Loughborough College of Art & Design (LCAD) from premises shared with Loughborough College to a new LCAD Library and Learning Resources Centre (LLRC). Through the joint LCAD/LU Learning Resources Working Group, arrangements for operation of the LLRC after merger of LCAD and the University, and in the intervening year, were agreed. Funding was secured for reclassification of the LCAD Library stock, and conversion of the bibliographic database, in line with systems in use at the Pilkington Library. All LCAD Library records were available on the Pilkington Library OPAC by the end of the year; reclassification was expected to be virtually complete at the end of September. Jeff Brown and David Lewis are commended for their management of the conversion and reclassification projects.

A cycle of planning and reporting is well established in the Library, and all Teams again produced operational plans for the year and reports on the previous year's work. Progress against the overall Library operational plan for 1996/97 is reported throughout this Report.

In the Spring of 1997 an environmental analysis was written, and all Library staff were involved in a wide-ranging SWOT analysis, in preparation for the 1997/8-2000/1 Library strategic plan. By the end of the year, the content of the plan had been broadly agreed within the Library, with a written document expected at the end of September 1997.

Expenditure on books, and the number of items ordered, was at the same level as in 1995/6; serials expenditure rose by nine per cent. The total number of books received, however, was ten per cent fewer than in 1995/96 - a greater proportion than usual of the books ordered during the year failed to be delivered by the end of July. In the wake of the abandonment of the Net Book Agreement, higher discounts were negotiated with library suppliers.

The amount of material awaiting cataloguing and classification - never substantial - declined slightly during the year. The 1996 serials review resulted in 55 cancellations and 50 new subscriptions; in the summer of 1997 cancellations totalling £30,000 were agreed. During the year a review of closed runs of serials was carried out: on the basis of University-wide consultation, agreement was reached on which volumes were no longer useful and could be discarded to free shelf space. In the Summer of 1996 the book stock was weeded, using criteria agreed with Library Users Committee: 18,355 items, representing older material no longer used, were discarded - with at least one copy of each work being retained on the shelves. Work continued on refining the Library's binding policy.

The year under review witnessed further growth in Library provision of access to electronic information, and in the advantage taken of it: use of the BIDS databases, for example, rose by sixteen per cent. A number of external networked databases was added to those already available to Library users, and by the end of the year the Library subscribed to thirty-six databases on CD-ROM - seventeen networked across the University. Data on the use made of CD-ROMs in 1996/97 are not, unfortunately, available to the Library. A prototype Windows CD-ROM service was introduced, but lack of resources delayed its extension to all operating systems. In a climate of increasing end-user access to electronic services, it was not surprising that requests for mediated online searches (a charged service) fell by a further third - with such requests received from members of only seven academic departments, the majority in the Science Faculty.

The Library's pioneering electronic journal service was further developed during the year, with access provided to the output of seven commercial publishers. Through Library participation in the Café Jus research project, access was available for part of the year to titles from another three companies. Access to electronic journals has so far been free of charge to the Library, partly under the terms of the HEFCE Pilot Site Licensing Initiative which ends in 1998. A priority for 1997/98 will be the formulation of Library policy on - and the allocation of funding to - continuing the service on the basis of charged subscriptions to electronic journals.

Further developments in electronic information provision included the assumption of responsibility for the information sources section of the Information Gateway; the ending, because of technical difficulties and cost, of the experimental journal contents pages service; and the availability via the OPAC of all reading lists received in the Library.

The Library is committed to continuing expansion of access to information in electronic form, and particularly to the provision of additional full-text services including locally-produced material. Technological and financial constraints, however, continue to dictate the nature of provision and the speed and effectiveness with which new services can be introduced. The planned re-cabling of the Pilkington Library building will represent a major advance in the capability of the Library service to offer enhanced opportunities for information access and delivery to the University community.

It was a source of considerable satisfaction to see Project ACORN, with Hazel Woodward as Project Director after the departure of John Arfield, develop as one of the most successful projects of the Electronic Libraries Programme. The Project's own Annual Report gives a comprehensive overview of the year's progress, and can be found through the ACORN Web site at URL http://acorn.lboro.ac.uk (or in printed form from the Pilkington Library). The overall aim of the Project is to develop a transferable model for the process of establishing and managing an electronic short loan collection of journal articles, an area of great interest to all academic libraries concerned to maximise access to learning resources for large groups of students. The Library has already learnt much from the work done by the Project staff, and looks forward to additional benefits accruing for the Library service.

The drive to strengthen liaison with Library users - and non-users - was maintained, with the creation with effect from 1 August 1996 of three Faculty Teams of Library staff in place of the previous four School Teams. Bob Rhodes took up a new role as Academic Services Manager for Engineering, and adjustments were made to the staffing of the Social Sciences & Humanities and Science Teams. Pressures on staff time - and staff changes - continued to constrain initiatives in support of the teaching, learning and research of academic departments, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the developing relationship between Library users and the Faculty Teams is both valued and productive.

The teaching of transferable information handling skills is an essential part of the Library's core mission. It was pleasing to see the amount of staff time devoted to such teaching rise by eighteen per cent, and the total number of individuals attending training sessions increase by fifty per cent. More departments took advantage of the joint induction sessions presented by Computing Services, the Flexible Learning Initiative and the Library; twenty-seven Lunchtime in the Library 'drop-in' sessions were held; and the Internet & Information stream of courses arranged through Staff Development and delivered in collaboration with Computing Services staff was extended. The role of Paul Hollands, the University's Internet Information Officer until May 1997, was crucial in developing new courses and creating Web pages to support them. Formal provision of information handling skills as part of postgraduate research training followed the pattern of previous years. A new initiative was Library involvement in the Learning and communication skills module of the Foundation Programme in Science and Engineering. Library staff contributed to the revision of the IT skills guide, and five Academic Librarians delivered guest lectures to students of the Department of Information & Library Studies.

As in 1995/96, most indicators demonstrated the decline in traditional library activity apparently triggered by semesterisation. The decline was, however, less marked this year. There were three per cent fewer visits to the Library, as opposed to a six per cent fall in 1995/6 compared with 1994/5. Books issued declined by 0.7 per cent (6.7 per cent the previous year), although total loan transactions - issues and renewals - rose by 1.6 per cent. Use during the evenings remained steady, and increased at weekends. The number of enquiries recorded fell by seven per cent, possibly because Library users were becoming more familiar both with the Library OPAC and electronic services generally. Requests from Library users for inter-library loans fell by 8.7 per cent, while public photocopying decreased only slightly - by 1.6 per cent, compared with 3.2 per cent the previous year. Copying from microforms fell by 29 per cent, it is thought because most such copying in the past was from microform versions of newspapers, which are now increasingly available to Library users through CD-ROM or networked services.

Research undertaken by Alison McNab during the year identified several factors affecting Library usage: changes in teaching and learning; changes in student behaviour; the fact that the recording of visits to the Library cannot be separated from DILS traffic; the content of the Short Loan Collection; and the 'virtual campus'. The available - mostly anecdotal - evidence suggests that time pressures inherent in semesterisation and modularised courses lead students to visit the Library less frequently, and to do less background reading, than formerly. At the same time, the proliferation of full-text electronic sources, often networked, contributes to changing patterns of information seeking and retrieval.

Circulation traffic again dipped at the ends of semesters, and at the start of Semester 2, but less dramatically than in the first year of semesterisation. Staff greeted with relief the resolution of data corruption problems experienced when swipe cards were used in the Library and at the squash courts. Reservation delivery times showed an improvement on the previous year, 54 per cent being satisfied in less than eight days (47 per cent in 1995/96). The number of items re-shelved increased by 0.6 per cent.

Improvements to the presentation and content of the Library's Web pages were implemented, and the printed leaflets and information sheets updated. In June Mike Chaney led the Library's participation in the Teaching and Learning Innovations Fair organised by the Flexible Learning Initiative, receiving an interested and favourable response to promotion of the Library's latest innovations in information services.

After sixteen years' heavy use much Library furniture was in need of refurbishment or replacement. Through the Furniture Office, all study tables on Level 1 of the Pilkington Library building were cleaned and resurfaced during the year, and all chairs on Level 1 were replaced. It is hoped that funding will be made available to enable the rest of the study furniture to be renovated in due course. The recommendations of a review of signing and guiding were implemented, the Short Loan exit turnstyle replaced, microform reader/printer facilities improved, and the disaster management plan progressed. The work of Marion Shields in all these areas was appreciated.

Various measures were taken to improve the security of the building and its staff and contents. Arrangements for the registration and badging of all visitors were put in place; twice-weekly security checks at the entrance to the Library were instituted; the effectiveness of the security barriers was monitored; the fire, door and trophy cabinet alarms were linked to the University Gatehouse; and an intercom to the Library General Office and the Department of Information & Library Studies was installed at the Loading Bay of the Library.

Information technology is fundamental to all Library operations, and the Library continued to benefit from the expertise of its Systems staff and Computing Services colleagues in upgrading IT facilities and developing new services. At the beginning of the year the graphical OPAC - Talis WebOPAC - was installed on all public OPAC terminals in the Library in place of the original text-based version. Unfortunately, there was a serious unforeseen impact on system performance in the early weeks of Semester 1, when OPAC is very heavily used. It became apparent that the IT infrastructure (low specification PCs, the Library's server, network cabling and routing) in the building was not capable of supporting the additional demands imposed by users searching the WebOPAC. Steps which could be taken quickly, such as increasing the memory in PCs and the file server, went some way to alleviate the difficulties. The Library was grateful for additional funding to purchase a more powerful Talis server, which was installed at Computing Services towards the end of the year, and hopes to see the building re-cabled in the near future.

Successive Talis software upgrades were implemented during the year. These entailed few significant developments, enabling staff to consolidate their knowledge of existing Talis functionality. Library staff made various improvements to the OPAC, creating several subcatalogues. Support of networked and stand-alone CD-ROMs continued to occupy a significant proportion of Systems staff time. The Library was without a Systems Manager for several months during the year, and much appreciated the contribution of Gary Brewerton during that period.

The training and development of a staff appropriately skilled to respond to user needs and deliver high quality services continued to be accorded due priority within the Library. The annual staff development review identified those areas in which individuals would welcome additional training, needs subsequently addressed by the Training Group. A full and varied training programme of in-house and bought-in sessions was well received by staff, and Heather Watkins, as Training Officer, is congratulated on her achievements. Registration for appropriate NVQs was explored, and in conjunction with other support services of the University the Library made further progress towards the Investors in People standard. A training programme for Library staff wishing to achieve Associateship of the Library Association was registered with the Association.

Notable successes achieved by Library staff during the year included the award of a PhD to Karlis Kreslins; an MSc (with Distinction) to Elizabeth Gadd; and a BLS to Karen Ingall. All studied in the Department of Information & Library Studies. Joyce Bartlett achieved the foundation stage of the Association of Accounting Technicians qualification.

John Arfield, University Librarian for four years, resigned in the Autumn on his appointment to the post of University Librarian at the University of Western Australia. During his time at Loughborough John worked to maintain the Pilkington Library in the forefront of innovative service delivery, especially in the area of electronic access to information. He undertook a major restructuring of the Library, and encouraged the development of a culture of formal planning and reporting, with greater emphasis on training.

Simon Tanner, Systems Manager, left the Library in February; his replacement, Dawn Cole, arrived in July. Jack Cooper returned to the United States in November, at the end of his nine-month job exchange with Deborah Stanley; Paul Hollands, Internet Information Officer, resigned in May; and Paula Kingston, who as ACORN Project Manager contributed much to the Project's excellent reputation, left in July. Tracy Marshall was appointed to a job-share post in the SSH Team, and temporary contracts were issued to Jennifer Drury (Engineering Team), Marigold Cleeve and Nicki Kendall (both to assist with the reclassification of LCAD Library stock).

In the past two years the Library has seen its Senior Management Team reduced from six to four. Elsewhere in the Library, one Assistant Librarian post is temporary; another has a rolling contract. A decision on replacement of an essential part-time Library Assistant post has been deferred, and as the year ended the resignations of a temporary Senior Library Assistant and an Assistant Librarian were imminent. There was no prospect of replacement in the near future. The quality, enthusiasm and loyalty of its staff are the Library's chief assets, and must be sustained: the Library looks forward to budgetary and staffing reviews being completed early in 1997/98, and to early establishment of a staff structure appropriate to current Library aims and objectives.

Mary Morley

University Librarian

September 1997