Compliance Status

Louisiana State University and A&M College is in compliance with this principle.

Narrative

Louisiana State University and A&M College (LSU) Libraries provide access to information – through several library facilities, virtual means, and qualified staff – for a community of over 1,179 full-time faculty and 27,365 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. These facilities and other learning/information resources are appropriate to support the university’s teaching, research, and service mission.

Facilities

The LSU Libraries system includes two principal facilities on the Baton Rouge campus – Middleton Library (main) [1] and Hill Memorial Library (special collections) [2]. The University has administrative responsibility for the Veterinary Medicine Library [3], the Cartographic Information Center [4], the Louisiana Transportation Research Center library [5], and the Center for Energy Studies library [6], all located in non-LSU Libraries’ facilities. Additionally, the Law School Center supports a law library [7] located on the Baton Rouge campus.  

Middleton Library

Middleton Library [8] is a 324,870 square foot building [9] built in 1958 that houses the main collections. The facility comprises a basement and four floors. The basement houses Cataloging, Administrative Services, Database Management, and Government Documents, as well as closed stacks compact shelving for the main collection and Special Collections. The first floor, with a single public entrance point, contains Circulation; Interlibrary Lending; Reference Services; CC’s Coffee Shop; the Center for Academic Success Shell Tutorial Center [10]; the Faculty Technology Center [11], which is run by LSU’s Information Technology Services (ITS) unit; and the Visualization Services Center [12].  The second floor houses Music Resources [13], Education Resources [14], the Dean’s office, the server room, some stacks, an ITS-run computer lab, and electronic classrooms.  Floors three and four house the bulk of the library’s stacks, presentation practice rooms, group study areas, and individual study carrels.

Hill Memorial Library

Hill Memorial Library, which houses the Special Collections, comprises 51,851 square feet of storage, office, public, and exhibit space [15]. In the mid-1980s, the building was renovated specifically to house the libraries’ unique, rare, and historical collections that until then had existed as physically and administratively separate collections housed in Middleton Library. Features include six floors of closed stacks, a waterless fire suppression system, swipe-card access exterior doors, a monitored alarm system, security cameras, and a walk-in freezer to support treatment of wet, moldy, or insect-infested materials. Hill Memorial Library underwent a $523,624 upgrade to its HVAC system to improve temperature and humidity control in the stacks in late 2012. Public areas include exhibition galleries on two floors, a reading room, and the lecture hall, which seats up to 100 people.

Veterinary Medicine Library

Located on the first floor of the Veterinary Medicine building, the Veterinary Medicine Library occupies 7,400 square feet with a seating capacity of 112. Current holdings include approximately 50,000 volumes and over 3,000 current periodical titles, along with a growing collection of over 250 electronic books dealing with all aspects of veterinary medicine, as well as selected materials on human medicine, comparative medicine, public health, the animal sciences, and other related areas.

Others

The Cartographic Information Center is located in room 313 of the Howe-Russell-Kniffen Geoscience Complex. The space includes a closed stack map room, a reading room, a seminar room, and office space. The Louisiana Transportation Research Center Library is located in the Louisiana Transportation Research Center building, and the Center for Energy Studies Library is located in the LSU Energy, Coast & Environment Building. See Principle 2.9 for detailed information about each department within the libraries.

Learning & Information Resources

According to the most recent statistics available from the Association of Research Libraries annual publication, ARL Statistics 2010-2011, LSU Libraries, including for ARL reporting purposes the Law Center Library and Veterinary Medicine Library, owns approximately 4,275,073 volumes [16], 2,243,562 microform units, and has access to over 168,925 electronic and print journals. (Note: Due to the complexities of determining what constitutes a current serial title, the ARL statistics for that figure are grossly inaccurate and unreliable. LSU is ranked 3^rd among ARL libraries with a reported 168,925 current serial titles, but that ranking reflects the inclusion of many serials titles that are part of aggregator databases, which sometimes include current issues and sometimes do not.  As other libraries struggle with the same issues of determining the status of serial titles, this statistic, as reported by all libraries, is suspect.) Along with information on current holdings, expenditures, and personnel and public services statistics, this document also contains comparisons to peer institutions. According to these statistics, the LSU Libraries system ranks 46 out of the 113 libraries surveyed for the number of volumes in the library.

The Special Collections library in Hill Memorial houses approximately 164,300 titles (books, periodicals, prints, pamphlets, microforms, and Louisiana state documents) of the over four million total volumes, approximately 2,500 maps, more than 36,265 reels of microfilm (mostly of Louisiana newspapers), 250,000+ historic photographs, and 5,100 manuscript collections, which, combined with the University Archives, make up 15,133 linear feet of historic documents and records. 

Technological Services

Middleton Library contains several electronic classrooms. Three rooms are outfitted as laboratories with more than 20 computers each for hands-on training. Two rooms have demonstration computers for the speaker or instructor. One of the computer classrooms is scheduled by LSU Information Technology Services (ITS) for its own instruction courses; one is primarily used for credit-bearing information literacy instruction provided by librarians; and a third is available for ad hoc scheduling through the Library Reference Department, with or without librarian instruction provided.

During summer 2010, $430,000 of Student Tech Fee funds were used for library renovations in Middleton Library. In the Reference Department (Room 141), three separate workspaces were created for students: two for collaborative work study spaces, one for individual study. A help desk near that area is staffed by ITS staff to provide technological assistance. In addition, seven two-person study stations with power were installed. In room 126, ‘diner style’ group collaborative booth seating was installed along the wall space bordering the CC’s coffee shop. On the third and fourth floors, the copier areas were transformed into presentation practice rooms containing whiteboards and computers. Also, two new rooms on each of the third and fourth floors were created for collaborative group work.

In cooperation with ITS, LSU Libraries maintains an Information Commons in Room 141 [17].  This room houses the library’s reference desk and reference stacks; three ITS help desks for specific technological problems; a wide-screen, segmentally programmable television; a large-scale print facility; and 100 work stations. Many of these stations are equipped with scanners. The workstation computers are divided mainly among Macintosh and Windows operating systems, with a few running Linux. In addition, ITS maintains a computer lab with more than 150 computers in Room 241.

Virtual Resources

LSU is part of the Louisiana Online University Information System (LOUIS) [18], which provides support and electronic resources access to university libraries in the state. Online catalogs of 33 institutions’ libraries in Louisiana are accessible online through LOUIS [19]. A selection of periodical databases and full-text journals can also be retrieved through the network [20]. The libraries electronic resources are available online 24 hours a day to all LSU students, faculty, and staff through id and password authentication. Usage data indicates 1,375,015 full-text journal article downloads during fiscal year 2012 [21]. The Web-based Online Catalog provides remote search capability of the entire collection from any computer with an Internet connection [1]. The LOUISiana Digital Library [22] contains digital surrogates, which are available 24 hours a day, of selected materials held in Special Collections..

Most indoor and some outdoor campus areas are provided with wireless network connections, and many students use their own laptops or laptops borrowed from the library, both inside the library and in the outdoor areas adjacent to it. From these, they can access the university’s online resources, including those of the library.

ITS provides two additional services within Middleton Library. One is a technology support center dedicated to the needs of faculty and staff. The other is the Visualization Services Center, which provides training and support for 3-D visualization and projection software using high performance graphics workstations.

Additional information about the facilities and learning/information resources appropriate to support the teaching, research, and service mission of Louisiana State University may be found in Principle 2.9, Principle 3.8.2, Principle 3.8.3 and Principle 3.3.1.3.