An update from University Librarian Roxanne Missingham
31 August 2020
It has been an extraordinary year for the university. Despite the challenges of delivering library services through the many disasters, the period of working from home has meant that many additional library staff could work on the flood replacement project. Over 20 staff have worked on the project, searching high and low for books which has led to a significant increase in acquisitions.
I am delighted to report that we have reached two major milestones. Firstly it is with great joy that we have reached a final settlement for Insurance. I am very grateful to staff in Finance and Business Services for their work – particularly Tracey McRoberts. Secondly the work on reshelving to make room for the replacement volumes on level 3 in the JB Chifley Library is completed, and reshelving in other libraries is very close to completion. Acquiring collection material is happening rapidly as dedicated staff are managing the ordering, receipt, processing and shelving of the replacement material.
21,857 titles lost in the flood are now available through the ANU Library catalogue. The purchased and generously donated material is particular focused in the areas of history and philosophy.
20% of material lost is now available for your use!
Major new acquisitions
Recent flood replacement acquisitions include:
- Over 2,500 electronic books from Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Brill and De Gruyter.
- 29 streaming videos of ethnographic and historic significance from the AIATSIS collection.
- 3 ProQuest online modules that reinstate access to microfilm sets lost in the flood:
- Archive Finder – a current directory which describes over 220,000 collections of primary source material housed in thousands of repositories across the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland.
- The NAACP Papers collection – two online modules reproducing a wide range of digitised archive material of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. With a timeline that runs from 1909 to 1972, users can examine the realities of segregation in the early 20th century to the triumphs of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and beyond.
Donations
A total of 3,138 flood replacement donations have been received since the 2018 incident. The books have been processed and are available for loan in the JB Chifley Library.
We are extremely grateful for the recent donation of 689 books from the ANU School of Philosophy from their Benjamin Memorial Library collection. These works have recently been added to the ANU Library catalogue. We are grateful to the Benjamin family for agreeing to the transfer.
Library staff are currently working on a large donation of more than 500 items offered by the ANU School of Demography from their Caldwell Library collection.
We are enormously grateful to all our donors. Particular thanks to Associate Professor Colin Klein and all those in the Schools of Philosophy and Demography.
Collection rebuilding
The ANU Library still continues to work with publishers and other suppliers in Australia and overseas to rebuild the collections lost in the flood:
- Harry Hartog bookshop staff are currently checking a list of 2,200 Australian publications to see what books they are able to source.
- 3,500 flood replacement print books have been purchased from two large library suppliers in the USA and in Europe. The coronavirus outbreak has impacted international shipping causing delivery delays. The books are expected to arrive in September.
Open Access
- 1,012 flood titles, openly accessible through HathiTrust Digital Library, have been made available via the ANU Library catalogue and SuperSearch.
- 6,355 items from the Official Document collection of the JB Chifley Library were lost in the 2018 flood. Many of the titles are no longer available for purchase in print but they are openly accessible online from trusted repositories with excellent permanent links. Library staff are currently searching for and sourcing stable and persistent uniform resource identifiers that provide access to the material lost in the flood. The OA titles will become available to the ANU community via the Library catalogue in the very near future.
Replacement summary
Titles |
|||
Collection |
Titles lost |
Titles available |
% titles available |
|
Monographs |
91,839 |
20,948 |
22.81 |
|
Reference |
1,621 |
180 |
11.10 |
|
Serials |
3,708 |
456 |
12.30 |
|
Microforms |
5,384 |
59 |
1.10 |
|
Audio-visual |
1,237 |
65 |
5.25 |
|
Official Documents |
5,806 |
149 |
2.57 |
TOTAL |
109,595 |
21,857 |
19.94 |
Items |
|||
Collection |
Items lost |
Items available |
% items available |
|
Monographs |
113,393 |
29,310 |
25.85 |
|
Reference |
|
|
|
|
Serials |
|
|
|
|
Microforms |
|
|
|
|
Audio-visual |
1,701 |
84 |
4.94 |
|
Official Documents |
|
|
|
TOTAL |
115,094 |
29,394 |
25.54 |
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