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 | Unsure of Structural Integrity, Salem State Closes Its Library
The library at Salem State University (SSU), Salem, MA, was ordered closed by the university's president October 15 after state officials said they could not guarantee the structural integrity of the building. At the recommendation of the state Division of Capital Asset Management (DCAM), SSU president Patricia Maguire Meservey immediately closed the library for at least one week, and until further notice. She acknowledged that "closing a key academic building, the library," posed a great challenge to the university. This is especially problematic for the library at SSU, which also houses classrooms, support centers such as the university's learning center, and academic advising, as well as faculty offices.
University spokesperson Karen Cady told the LJ Academic Newswire that the building was not determined to be unsafe but rather that engineers were simply unable to properly determine the library's true condition. "There was no imminent catastrophic failure of the building," Cady said. "But the engineers called and said we have serious concerns for which we don't have answers and we can't get them for awhile." Engineers are now attempting to figure out whether the building—or parts of it—are safe to be reoccupied. The evaluation is just beginning and has no timetable.
The library, Cady noted, has been plagued with problems from the beginning. Initial construction began in the 1960s during an infamous period of corruption in Massachusetts that shortchanged a number of public works in the state. "The building has always had issues," Cady said, recalling corrective projects started immediately when the library opened in 1969. "There was a lot of remediation work in the 70s, and through the years specific areas have always been problematic," Cady says. "We have done a lot of patchwork analyses and fixed problems in various parts of the building."
With the building faltering and library needs changing, university officials began the process of modernizing the library with a comprehensive study undertaken over the summer by DCAM. As part of that study, engineers pooled previous studies and gathered every piece of documentation available on the building, but found key information gaps. "The engineers couldn't determine what the actual loadbearing capacity was," Cady explained. "They just didn't have any specific information." In addition, she said, the library is being used differently today than it was in its early years, with a space shortage on campus forcing administrators to convert areas of the library for things like faculty offices, which has added additional loadbearing stress.
Administrators have reassigned classes scheduled to meet in the library to new locations, and are busy finding space for faculty offices and devising a plan to deliver library services. Librarians are currently scattered among different academic departments with a meeting planned for today to determine their next move. For the short term, Cady said the plan for offering library service will include utilizing nearby public libraries and "sister institutions," such Middlesex Community College, Northern Essex Community College, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The library will also take advantage of its electronic collections, including more than 30,000 full-text journals. Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, meanwhile, earmarked $41 million for a library renovation at SSU in his education bond bill this month.
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LJ's Annual Placements & Salaries Survey: Average Salaries Up, Disturbing Trends Emerge
As usual, there is good news and some not-so-good news in Library Journal's annual Placements & Salaries Survey (What's an MLIS Worth?). Among the survey's highlights, women's average starting salaries have finally cracked the $40,000 barrier, increasing to $40,566 annually with a substantial gain of 11.3 percent in the Southwest. However, the survey also found that women's salaries continue to lag behind salaries for men, this year by roughly 6.5 percent.
Some 1,992 graduates submitted responses for this year's survey, approximately 37 percent of the estimated total graduates, an increase of 12 percent from last year's survey. Of those responding, 90.8 percent reported they had landed a job. Of those, 89.9 percent reported placement in some type of library agency, down slightly from 92.9 percent in 2005. Overall, graduates reported modest but solid growth in salaries, with an average increase of 2.2 percent, from $40,118 in 2005 to $41,014.
An increasing number of grads, however, reported taking nonprofessional positions. While those jobs make up less than ten percent of the overall placements, nonprofessional positions increased by almost 37.5 percent between 2005 and 2006 after declining between 2003 and 2005. Nonprofessional positions most frequently included titles such as technical assistant, clerk, or customer service assistant, suggesting that LIS graduates are accepting jobs typically filled by support staff without graduate degrees in order to gain experience or simply to find a job, any job. In addition, more reported taking temp positions, multiple part-time positions, and many reported "a longer average" job search.
Other highlights: jobs in "information technology," which can include everything from "information policy analysis" to "software engineering" saw the biggest growth, a 57.8 percent rise in placements (from 30 reported positions in 2005 to 71 in 2006) and an 8.8 percent increase in the average annual salary ($53,083). Acquisitions saw the best salary increase (up approximately 16.7 percent to $38,894). Circulation salaries experienced the worst drop (down 10.8 percent to $32,334).
On the downside, the number of graduates reporting minority status continued to decline—from 12 percent in 2005 to 10.7 percent in 2006—despite increased numbers of overall respondents and more graduates reporting race and ethnicity than in previous years. Minority salaries also took a step back. Minority graduates in 2006 reported an average annual salary of $40,750, a 3.5 percent drop from a high of $42,233 in 2005. In 2006, there was less than one percent difference between the salaries obtained by minority graduates and overall salaries—a reversal of past patterns when reported salaries for this group were an average of 6 percent higher.
The full article is available here.
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| As NIH Policy Hits the Senate, the White House Enters the Picture
The 2008 Labor Health and Human Services (LHHS) appropriations bill (S.1710) which contains a revised public access policy for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is close to a vote in the Senate. In a "Statement of Administration Policy" (SAP) memo, however, the White House has come out against the funding bill, and has specifically acknowledged the new NIH policy among its concerns. The NIH policy, strongly supported by libraries for years—and opposed by many publishers—would require researchers to deposit their final articles in the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) PubMed Central database to be made freely available within a year as a condition of grant funding.
The SAP memo says the administration "strongly opposes" S.1710 because of an "excessive level of spending" and "other objectionable provisions." Regarding the NIH public access policy, the SAP memo notes: "The Administration believes that any policy should balance the benefit of public access to taxpayer supported research against the possible impact that grant conditions could have on scientific research publishing, scientific peer review and on the United States' longstanding leadership in upholding strong standards of protection for intellectual property."
The inclusion of the language concerning the NIH policy comes after an intense lobbying effort by the publishing industry. Notably, the language in the SAP memo closely mirrors concerns expressed on the Association of American Publishers' PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine) web site. SPARC executive director Heather Joseph told the LJ Academic Newswire there has been an "all out blitz" by publishers against the legislation in recent weeks as the legislative process nears a vote in the Senate.
Although the bill is expected to easily pass the Senate with the NIH language intact, the process will likely not end soon. Joseph said a veto of S.1710 is expected and conceded that the White House's acknowledgment of the NIH policy in its SAP memo could give opponents of the policy another chance to fight the language.
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| Yale to Unveil Renovated and Renamed Library
Students and faculty at Yale University will get their first glimpse of the newly renovated and newly named Bass Library tonight at a midnight opening. Yale officials said the opening of the new library will be marked with a procession of students, faculty, and staff carrying the first 20 books from the Wright Reading Room in the basement of Sterling Memorial Library to the shelves of the new Bass Library, a ceremony designed to recall both the "meeting of the ministers who in 1701 gathered to donate books for Yale's creation and the procession of books in 1930 that marked the move from Yale's Old Library (now Dwight Hall) to Sterling Memorial Library."
Formerly known as the Cross Campus library, the Bass Library is named to honor the support of Anne T. and Robert M. Bass. It features new group study rooms, individual study carrels, and custom-designed furnishings and will house "intensive-use and reserve collections needed by readers on a daily basis." It will also house a new Collaborative Learning Center, operated in partnership by the Yale University Libraries, the Instructional Technology Group, the McDougal Graduate Teaching Center, the Yale Center for Language Study, and Yale Information Technology Services. The new Library Café, operated by Yale Dining Services and the Yale Sustainable Food Project, will be open to the public as well as to the Yale community.
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Best Sellers in Microbiology, March 2007–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
(13 digit ISBNs in brackets)
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Vaccinated: One Man's Quest To Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases
Offit, Paul A.
Smithsonian Books
2007. ISBN 0061227951 [9780061227950]. $26.95
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Third Domain: The Untold Story of Archaea and the Future of Biotechnology
Friend, Tim
National Academies
2007. ISBN 0309102375 [9780309102377]. $27.95
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Sampling and Analysis of Indoor Microorganisms
Yang, Chin S.
John Wiley
2007. ISBN 0471730939 [9780471730934]. $79.95
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Antisepsis, Disinfection, and Sterilization: Types, Action, and Resistance
McDonnell, Gerald E.
American Society for Microbiology
2007. ISBN 1555813925 [9781555813925]. $119.95
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Physiology and Biochemistry of Extremophiles
Gerday, Charles
American Society for Microbiology
2007. ISBN 1555814220 [9781555814229]. $129.95
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Cellular and Molecular Immunology
Abbas, Abul K.
Elsevier Saunders
2007. ISBN 1416031227 [9781416031222]. $72.95
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Archaea: Molecular and Cellular Biology
Cavicchioli, Ricardo
American Society for Microbiology
2007. ISBN 1555813917 [9781555813918]. $129.95
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Sulphate-Reducing Bacteria: Environmental and Engineered Systems
Barton, Larry L.
Cambridge University Press
2007. ISBN 0521854857 [9780521854856]. $145.00
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Molecular Approaches to Soil, Rhizosphere and Plant Microorganism Analysis
Cooper, J.E.
CABI Publishing
2006. ISBN 1845930622 [9781845930622]. $150.00
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HIV and the Pathogenesis of Aids
Levy, Jay A.
American Society for Microbiology
2007. ISBN 1555813933 [9781555813932]. $99.95
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Biofilm Primer
Castleton, J. William
Springer
2007. ISBN 3540680217 [9783540680215. $49.95
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Papillomaviruses
Garcea, Robert L.
Springer
2007. ISBN 0387365222 [9780387365220]. $139.00
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Food Microbiology: Fundamentals and Frontiers
Doyle. Michael P.
American Society for Microbiology
2007. ISBN 1555814077 [9781555814076]. $169.95
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Dendritic Cell Interactions with Bacteria
Rescigno, Maria
Cambridge University Press
2007. ISBN 0521855861 [9780521855860]. $130.00
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Enzyme-Mediated Resistance to Antibiotics: Mechanisms, Dissemination, and Prospects for Inhibition
Bonomo, Robert
American Society for Microbiology
2007. ISBN 1555813038 [9781555813031]. $129.95
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Prions in Humans and Animals
Hornlimann, Beat
Walter De Gruyter
2007. ISBN 3110182750 [9783110182750]. $213.30
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Vaccine Adjuvants and Delivery Systems
Manmohan Singh
John Wiley
2007. ISBN 0471739073 [9780471739074]. $115.00
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Immunity: The Immune Response in Infectious and Inflammatory Disease
Defranco, Anthony L.
Sinauer Associates
2007. ISBN 0878931791 [9780878931798]. $49.95
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Poxviruses
Mercer, A.A.
Birkhauser
2007. ISBN 3764375566 [9783764375560]. $149.00
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Cytokines in Human Health: Immunotoxicology, Pathology, and Therapeutic Applications
House, Robert V.
Humana
2007. ISBN 1588294676 [9781588294678]. $149.00
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