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Proceedings of the 8th Annual |
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The National Park Service Library Program David Nathanson Harpers Ferry, WV The aim of this session is to provide you with some basic information about the library program of the NPS. I'm going to talk about what it is, what some of our problems are, and what we are doing about it. I'm also going to talk about some of the collections and bibliography programs that we maintain. The Components
The NPS library program is made up of a program coordinator, an advisory council and the NPS library system itself. The program coordinator works for our Information and Telecommunications Center in Washington - the computer folks. Amalin Ferguson is the coordinator and she is duty-stationed in San Francisco. The last slide in this presentation provides her name, phone number, and her e-mail address. The Library Program’s plans and activities are described in an article written by Amalin Ferguson in CRM magazine (vol.21:6, Summer 1998) which is available on the WWW at: <http://tps.cr.nps.gov/crm/archive/21-6/21-6-11.pdf>. NPS Library Advisory Council and Steering Committee
The NPS Library Advisory Council is made up of librarians and library users, as well as information managers from other NPS program areas, including archives management, records management, etc. The planning and policy development for libraries is carried on by a subset of the LAC which we refer to as the Steering Committee, which is made up of the few professional librarians in the NPS, chaired by the coordinator. Members of the Steering Committee combine resources to maximize professional service to field staff and the public and to ensure access to NPS-related information. We do that by listening to the non-librarians of the Advisory Council and other users, to librarians outside the NPS and to each other, and by collaborating with other information specialists to link datasets and develop coordinated information management policies. We develop cooperative programs that are designed to stretch the existing library expertise in NPS so that the many non-librarian caretakers of NPS libraries can benefit. The NPS Library System
The NPS Library System is made up of the park libraries, central and support offices like my library - Harpers Ferry Center (HFC), Denver Service Center (DSC), the Western Archeological and Conservation Center in Tucson (WACC) and our network of support offices, some of which are staffed with professional librarians and try to support the park libraries in their region, like the Columbia Cascade Support Office in Seattle (CCSO) and the Southwest Support Office in Santa Fe. The system also includes the Technical Information Center at DSC and the various servicewide bibliography programs. I'll discuss all of these in a moment. The NPS Libraries
As this slide shows, there are almost 400 libraries in the NPS. Keep in mind that there are almost 380 areas in the National Park System and every area has some sort of library for the use of its staff or outside researchers. Some of these libraries are fairly large, like the 40-50,000 volumes at Morristown NHP in New Jersey, or the several thousand volume libraries in some of the older parks like Yellowstone, Grand Canyon and Yosemite. The size goes down to a few hundred volumes in many of the parks. Two things are usually true: first, the park libraries, especially in the the older parks, very often constitute the best collections that exist on the subject of the park. For example, if a researcher wants to write about the history of Yellowstone, he/she really needs to visit that park's library and archives. Second, some of the park libraries - again especially in the older parks, very often have unpublished and sometimes unique items in their collections. The park libraries are a significant resource for NPS staff, researchers, educators, and the public. Planning Issues
The biggest problem we have is the shortage of professional librarians, or even full-time library caretakers. Most of our libraries are managed by nonlibrarians on a collateral duty basis. There are also few parks that have an adequate budget for the library. We have a system of private, cooperating associations that operate the bookstores in park areas. They are very supportive of the library function in the parks, providing money for books, and sometimes - as in the case of Yellowstone - library staff. It has only been in the last few years that a concerted effort has been made to catalog park libraries in any standard library system. Park libraries are classified, if at all, in LC, Dewey or some home-grown system. Impacts on Information Seekers
So what does all this mean, for us, and for researchers who need to use our resources? We lose materials because we don’t have adequate accountability controls. Retrieval of information from the collections is confined to the local site and is generally inefficient in areas without full-time library managers. Because of lack of bibliographic standards, sharing of information across organizations, applications and formats is severely hindered. What we are doing about it
We are establishing standards - like the use of the LC classification system (although we continue to support Dewey at parks that use it), a standard bibliographic software for use in our libraries, the use of MARC records in our centralized systems, etc. We are looking at Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) funding. It is being used in Colorado to catalog some park libraries in that state. We are funding the servicewide use of ProCite software for libraries to manage their collections. We are also funding BookWhere, a Z39.50 client, that parks can use to acquire MARC format copy-cataloging from all the library catalogs available on the WWW so that we can feed our union catalog--I’ll talk about that in a moment. We have developed a program that will print out spine labels from ProCite records for use in the parks. We are also concerned with bibliographic control of NPS-produced publications and reports through our Technical Information Center and our bibliography programs. I will talk about those in a moment, also. Components of the NPS Union Library Catalog
In many ways, the centerpiece of our efforts is the NPS Union Library Catalog which we are in the process of assembling. The catalog will ultimately include records from every one of the almost 400 NPS libraries. Of course this will take time to accomplish for reasons I have already given. But we have started by putting several of the large library collections into our Voyager database. We have almost 150,000 records in it now. Voyager, a product of Endeavor Information Systems, as some of you may know, was recently selected by the Library of Congress to manage all their vast collections. Just to give you a comparison of the scope of our respective projects, the implementation team for LC includes 300 names - we have three people on ours - including me. Voyager has a Web search capability which they call WebVoyage. Our implementation of it is up and running (on the NPS intranet), but not yet publicized to the rest of the NPS. It works very well and we are happy with it so far. It offers "easy" and "expert" search levels, it supports "hot" links from records to digital resources described and, we are told, it supports simultaneous searching of multiple library catalogs on the Internet from our Voyager front end. Products of the NPS Union Library Catalog
The products and some of the benefits we hope to derive from the union catalog include more than just better access to the NPS library collections. There are themes that are of great interest to groups of park areas, e.g., Civil War, African-American history, biodiversity, etc. Our union catalog will allow park researchers to find out what other resources exist on a particular subject in NPS areas. We will also be able to search within a single park only, e.g., HFC Library. We will also be able to search by specific formats which are of interest to us (if they have been catalogued that way). Finally, we hope to integrate Servicewide interlibrary loan into the Voyager system. ParkNet Library Link: the NPS Library Program Web site
Our Web site is under development. It will be available, at least at first, only to the NPS domain. It will serve as an up-to-date source of library information and guidance, as well as a portal to our union catalog, FirstSearch and other online services. It will also house a directory of NPS libraries and contacts. In fact, our aim is that our Web site will become a gateway to all NPS-generated and NPS-related research. We will do this via links to other sites, as well as a GILS-type database. The target date for unveiling the Web page and NPS access to WebVoyage is this week--National Library Week. Special Collections and Bibliography Programs
Let’s talk a bit about some of the collections and bibliography programs in the NPS. I have already mentioned the significance of some of the larger park library collections. I’ll just mention two more: Morristown National Historical Park in New Jersey has one of the finest collections of 18th century Colonial and Revolutionary war materials in existence. (I love to describe their collections because they are so interesting. The main collection was the gift of a rare book collector. In addition to Revolutionary War era books, pamphlets and manuscripts, they have such things as a 1494 copy of the Nuremburg Chronicle, some of George Washington’s Mount Vernon account books and personal library, and a notebook containing documents signed by every king and queen of England since Henry II.) San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park has a large library and historic documents collection which covers U.S. maritime history of both coasts. NPS Historical Collections
E-mail: tom_durant@nps.gov You have a handout from HFC Library which describes these collections. I do want to point out that our huge photographic resource is the best collection anywhere on the National Park system before 1980. Cultural Resources Bibliography
The CRBIB is an inventory of over 12,000 reports on park cultural resources. It was developed in the early 1970s and initially included reports that were in the Washington office headquarters (WASO) repository. It was later expanded to include reports at the parks and regional offices. The original WASO repository is now located at HFC and includes about 7,000 of the reports. Parks, regions and the Park Historic Architecture Division, WASO account for the remaining 5,000. Some of the reports are available through NTIS. In 1985 a commercial firm, Chadwyck-Healey, in agreement with NPS, placed the reports available at that time on microfiche and copies were made available to each park and region at no cost. The company still markets the microfiche. The database, which is maintained in ProCite by the Park Historic Architecture Division, is available for search on the NPS intranet on Reference Web Poster, a Web front-end for ProCite software. Natural Resources Bibliography
You have a one-page handout on the NRBIB. Resource management staff in NPS identified bibliographies as a high priority. The need exists because this information is scattered, difficult to find, easily lost, and often not available anywhere else except at the parks where a lot of it was generated. Unlike the CRBIB, there is no repository. The reports and other materials are all located at the parks or regional offices. There is a Web site available to the public which provides more information and also allows you to search the bibliography. NPS Technical Information Center
You also have a handout on the TIC which gives you the salient facts about its history. That handout is also reproduced at: <www.nps.gov/dsc/tic/tichist.html>. TIC Collections
The important thing to remember about the TIC is the breadth and depth of the collection. I mentioned the CRBIB and the Chadwyck-Healey microfiche. Keep in mind that all of the drawings and reports in TIC have been microfilmed. The drawings and maps are stored on 35mm chips on aperture cards which are the old IBM cards with windows that hold pieces of microfilm. The reports are on microfiche. The numbers are impressive. The reports include cultural reports, like those in the CRBIB, some natural reports, like those in the NRBIB, management reports, like master plans, general management plans, etc., and infra-structure reports, like bridge inspections, etc. The overwhelming majority of the reports are NPS-produced. The TIC also provides copies of these products for a very reasonable cost. I should also mention that the HFC Library, which holds the CRBIB repository, also has microfiche copies of the 80,000 TIC reports, and also has its own circulating collection of about 6,000 NPS reports. A lot of overlap among all these collections of reports is inevitable, but there are still many reports unique to one collection or another. The Amoeba Project
The Amoeba project is the TIC’s method of bringing its collections to the NPS and the public over the Web. As of right now, it is only available to the NPS domain, but plans include placing it as a link on the NPS public Web site. "Dead" Libraries of the NPS
Before I leave you, I want to tell you about an interesting category of library which is widespread in the National Park System: what I refer to, tongue in cheek, as the "dead" library. As you know, a library is like a living organism - it grows and gives off waste. When it stops doing these things, it dies, it gets frozen in time. There are several significant examples of "dead" libraries in the National Park System. They are found in historically restored structures - like Carl Sandburg’s home in North Carolina, President Eisenhower’s home in Gettysburg, Frederick Douglass’ home in Washington, Thomas Edison’s labs in New Jersey. These are libraries that these people actually used, but that are now museum pieces. I would be remiss if I didn’t put in a plug for these sites and encourage you all to visit these parks and the over 375 other areas in the National Park System. Contacts Here are some names that you can contact for more information.
Phone: (415) 556-0238 E-mail: amalin_ferguson@nps.gov
Phone: (304) 535-6262 E-mail: david_nathanson@nps.gov
Phone: (303) 969-2130 E-mail: jannette_wesley@nps.gov
Phone: (206) 220-4153 Also:
Phone: (304) 535-6707 E-mail: tom_durant@nps.gov
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