to
develop and support a state-of-the-art information infrastructure
for the University;
Columbia University possesses one of the world's great research libraries. Assembled through decades of acquisition, its printed collections are matched in their depth and historical richness by few of its peers and are rapidly being augmented by a wide array of electronic resources. Among its component libraries are several that are regarded as among the finest of their kind. While AcIS (Academic Information Systems) is a much younger organization, it has assumed a leading role in the University's efforts to utilize new information technologies to further its educational and research programs, has actively participated in the national planning for the next generation of the Internet and, in partnership with the Libraries, has been responsible for much of the work that has made Columbia a leader in the development of the digital library, an on-line collection of electronic information resources.
While historically great and currently innovative, the University's information services face a future marked with uncertainties and challenges. The Libraries and AcIS are in the midst of a period of extraordinary change characterized by rapidly changing information technology, rising user demand, and the need to maintain the strength of the University's rich print collections while providing access to new electronic resources and tools. Compounding the complexity of this transition are the aging nature of many of the Libraries' physical facilities, the short life cycles of the new information technologies, and market forces that are increasing some key costs at a rate that is well above inflation.
In recent years, the University responded to these challenges with significant investments in the Libraries and AcIS. Since fiscal year 1995, these have included $4.7 million in network development, $1.7 million in electronic classrooms, $2.3 million in digital library development, an eight percent annual growth in the materials acquisition budget (during a period when the budgets of all of the academic units on the Morningside campus grew by 8.5 percent and the Arts and Sciences by 6.4 percent while central administrative budgets increased by two percent), $42.2 million in the first two phases of the renovation of Butler Library, and $2.0 million on the Gabe M. Wiener Music and Arts Library.
Recognizing the centrality of the Libraries and AcIS to its core academic mission, the University developed a six-year strategy, begun in 1998-99, for their further enhancement that significantly increases their operating budgets and makes substantial capital improvements in their operations and facilities. By fiscal year 2004, the operating budget of the Libraries will increase by 33.8 percent over fiscal year 1998, or $7.6 million, and that of AcIS by 113.5 percent, or $3.0 million. Since fiscal year 1995, the University has invested $66.5 million in capital in the Libraries and AcIS; by fiscal year 2004, it will commit at least another $57.9 million in capital funds to their enhancement. Additionally, the Libraries and AcIS have been budgetarily separated within the central administration to reflect their key roles in scholarly communication at Columbia and to ensure that their future development is not constrained by the more limited rate of growth the University has applied to the budgets of the University's central administrative units.
The six-year plan described in this report is the culmination of a lengthy process that involved a collaborative review of the Libraries and AcIS by their staffs, faculty, the University Senate, the Provost and Dean of Faculties and other members of the central University administration. The Provost also sought the advice of external visiting committees. In early 1997, the Libraries and AcIS were a featured part of the University's accreditation review by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools and the focus of a specially invited committee composed of leading librarians, academic information specialists and faculty from institutions throughout the country. Both endorsed the strategic plans of the Libraries and AcIS, noted the strength of their collections and services and praised the work of their staffs. However, both also identified important issues that needed to be addressed to maintain the effectiveness of the Libraries and AcIS as academic information resources for the Columbia community.
Drawing upon the advice of the external evaluation teams as well as their own analysis, the Libraries and AcIS proposed an Action Plan that was distributed to the University community in November 1997. The Action Plan built upon the base of investments made over the last several years. It proposed enhancements that were designed to further the strategic priorities of the Libraries and AcIS and thereby to ensure that the University community continues to enjoy traditional library services of outstanding quality while gaining the maximum benefit from the new information resources. The most important of those priorities are:
to
develop and support a state-of-the-art information infrastructure
for the University;
The Action Plan was reviewed widely by members of the Columbia community and was studied in-depth by the newly formed Provost's Faculty Advisory Committee on the Libraries and AcIS, a list of whose members is attached. The decisions discussed in this report reflect the results of those consultations. The report incorporates many of the proposals in the Action Plan in their original or a modified form. However, it also describes enhancements in other important areas not addressed in the Action Plan and different approaches for addressing some of the issues raised in that Plan. Therefore, the report is not simply an update of the Action Plan. It represents, instead, a collective assessment of the key strategies the Libraries and AcIS will need to follow and critical investments they will need to make to ensure that they meet the University's changing information needs through 2004.
The report is divided into three sections. The first two describe the enhancements that are being made in the Libraries and AcIS; the third provides a financial summary of the incremental investments that will be made through fiscal year 2004.
All of the strategies and investments outlined in this report will be the object of on-going review and evaluation. Substantial benchmark data have already been gathered through the opinion surveys the Libraries regularly conducts of faculty and students, staff performance measures and user statistics. Additional data have been collected as part of a faculty survey on University services that the Provost's Office conducted in spring 1998. This spring the Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian has commissioned a special survey to develop baseline data on faculty and student perceptions of the Libraries and AcIS. With the assistance of the Provost's Advisory Committee and the advice of the Senate Committee on Libraries and Academic Computing, the leaders of the Libraries and AcIS will continually monitor the outcomes of the enhancements planned for the next six years and make the adjustments required to keep pace with the changing environment in which they operate.
The measure of a great library system in the future will go far beyond the sheer size of its collections. It will focus instead on easy access to information resources, regardless of their format or location, and on their easy use for teaching and research. Annual increases of eight percent in the Libraries' materials budget have enabled it, with careful planning and judicious cancellations of little-used serials, to maintain strong print collections while providing access to an expanding array of electronic resources. But acquisition is only the first step toward making needed resources available. Over the six years from fiscal year 1999 to fiscal year 2004, the Libraries will make significant new investments in the housing of its collections, the manner in which they are maintained and the delivery of materials to users. These investments are designed both to produce immediate improvements in the availability of library resources and to ensure ease of access to the collections as they grow for decades into the future.
The facilities in which print and digital collections are used are similarly important to the intellectual life of the University and serve additionally as centers of social interaction for members of the campus community. The growth of the "virtual" library has not diminished the need for physical surroundings that are attractive, comfortable and technologically current. If anything, this need has increased as libraries gain a new role as places to use and learn about new information technologies while continuing to serve their more traditional function of bringing users together with librarians, printed resources and each other. Investments already made or committed under Phases I and II of the Butler renovation will go a long way toward modernizing the flagship of the Libraries and restoring its physical grandeur. Over the next six years, additional capital funds will be committed to continuing this project and to meeting high-priority needs in other campus libraries.
A great library, one that continues to provide traditional services of outstanding quality while aggressively expanding its digital resources, requires a highly skilled and dedicated staff. The Libraries has been effective in recruiting and retaining librarians in a competitive job market, but in order to do so it has had to make staffing reductions which have inhibited needed service improvements. Additional funding starting in fiscal year 1999 will be devoted to creating a salary pool that will permit the Libraries to stabilize staffing levels and to reward meritorious personnel when they are promoted.
The fast-changing nature of information technology is having a transformative effect on library resources and their delivery. While the Libraries has played a prominent role in the development of the digital library, further investments will be required in that area over the next six years to meet the expanding needs of the University's faculty and students. The Libraries will also invest in improvements to make its digital resources more accessible. With the rapid growth in its electronic holdings, the equipment and software needed to use them have become as important as the shelves that house the physical collections. Therefore, the Libraries' six-year plan will provide a solid and predictable funding base for the support of CLIO, the Libraries' on-line catalog, and the public workstations that enable the effective delivery of electronic information.
Improving Access to Print Collections
The vast majority of the Libraries' human and financial resources are devoted to selecting, acquiring and cataloging print materials, making them available on the shelves, and circulating them to users. The various activities that go into maintaining materials on the shelves are mundane, but taken together and managed in the context of the Libraries' large collections, they require a significant, on-going investment of resources to keep them readily accessible to users. The physical conditions of Columbia's stacks, many of which are inefficiently laid out, dark and hard to maintain, make these tasks more difficult and time-consuming than in many other academic libraries. Adding to these physical impediments, staffing has not kept pace in recent years with growth in the workloads caused by increased collection size, increased numbers of embrittled materials and overcrowded shelves. As a consequence, the rate of shelving has slowed, taking 13 percent more time in 1997 than in 1994, and the Libraries' staff was unable to maintain a schedule of shelfreading and daily straightening needed to keep shelves in order.
As it has become more difficult to find materials, user satisfaction has decreased and the number of complaints about the Libraries has grown. While almost two-thirds of the respondents in the faculty survey conducted in spring 1998 thought that the Libraries' resources were excellent, 60 percent often encountered problems in finding books that they needed. Dissatisfaction was particularly prevalent among users of Butler Library, 69 percent of whom responded that they had experienced difficulty in locating materials. While the problems reported in other libraries were not as high, slightly more than half of the users at the branch libraries indicated that materials they needed were often unavailable. Overall, only 61 percent of the faculty responding were satisfied with Columbia's libraries, and that figure dropped to 41 percent among those who use Butler.
Reversing these trends and materially improving the accessibility of materials is one of the Libraries' top priorities. Improvements in stack access requires action on four fronts:
The Libraries will make significant improvements in all four areas over the next six years.
The single most important component of the Libraries' strategy for improving access to the materials housed in the stacks is the construction of a high-density, off-site storage facility. Harvard University pioneered the high-density, automated inventory control model with its Book Depository -- a model now proven to be so efficient and cost effective that it is being widely replicated by other research libraries. At Columbia, most campus libraries are now full to the point of serious overcrowding. A library is considered full when books fill 85 percent of available shelves. Butler's shelves, by comparison, were at over 92 percent capacity when measured in spring 1998, with some stack tiers as high as 96 percent full. The conditions in some of the other libraries were even more severe. By spring 1998, Avery shelves were at 100 percent of capacity, and the stacks of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library could no longer accommodate new archival accessions of any significant size. By the year 2000, most smaller campus libraries will also be 100 percent full.
To relieve these conditions, the Libraries must move 1.1 million volumes from campus stacks to off-site storage. In addition, the current off-site facilities at Prentis and West 131st Street, which house 800,000 volumes, are inefficient and cost ineffective, provide poor service and, therefore, need to be replaced. Finally, the new facility must accommodate future growth in the collections which are expanding at the rate of 110,000 volumes a year. While the increasing availability of digital resources may eventually reduce the demand for printed materials, there is no evidence to suggest that will happen in the near future. Even as the University looks forward to a future rich in digital resources, the Libraries must plan on the assumption that it will need storage space for 2.2 million volumes by the year 2001 and a smaller but still significant number every year thereafter.
Columbia is not the only institution whose collections are outgrowing the space available to house them. Many other universities and research universities currently face that problem or will encounter it in the near future. The potential benefits in jointly constructing and operating a storage facility are considerable. In addition to reducing the costs of participating institutions, it will improve the quality and quantity of materials available to their library users and will open opportunities for other collaborative ventures that take advantage of the new information technologies. Columbia, therefore, decided to pursue a solution to its storage problems in collaboration with others rather than on its own. Provost Cole initiated a conversation with Princeton University and the New York Public Library in summer 1998 that has led to the signing of a letter of intent to create a consortium that will build and operate a high-density book storage facility based on the Harvard model on Princeton's Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, New Jersey. Initial construction plans call for three storage modules, each with a capacity of 2.0-2.5 million volumes. Land will be set aside for six additional modules, which will accommodate approximately 30 years of growth for the three institutions at current rates of acquisition, and an option for six more has been included in the letter of agreement if still more storage space is needed. The University has committed $10.4 million from its capital budget toward the construction of the first phase of the off-site facility and the transfer to it of over 2 million little-used volumes.
The initial transfers to the new storage facility will occur over the two years following the opening of the facility, which is now projected for fall 2001, as materials must be processed through its inventory control and locator system. In selecting materials for off-site storage, priority will be given to moving volumes out of the collections on campus and from a temporary facility, described below, on which the Libraries is relying while the high-density site is under construction. Thereafter, the facilities at Prentis and West 131st Street will be emptied and closed.
The selection criteria that will be used in deciding which materials to move out of the campus libraries will vary depending upon the needs of the disciplines they cover and the wishes of their faculty users who will be consulted closely in making those decisions. For example, most of the materials moved to the off-site facility from Butler will consist primarily of monographs that have not circulated since 1970, or, if they were purchased between 1971 and 1990, since they were acquired. In the science libraries, in contrast, the materials moved will consist primarily of journal back files, chosen from lists reviewed by the faculty. Overall, roughly 60 percent of the materials stored will be back issues of scientific and scholarly journals. All of the titles selected for the off-site facility will be available in a special database in CLIO Plus prior to being removed so that faculty can send on-line comments to the subject bibliographers to question any selection.
All materials transferred to off-site shelving will be represented by records in CLIO and will be processed through an item-level inventory control system to ensure their ready availability. Users will be able to request materials on-line or at circulation desks. Depending upon the time of day the request is made, delivery will usually be the next working day. Fax service for journal articles will be available, as is currently the case for materials at Prentis and West 131st Street.
Developing the off-site facility on a consortial basis will offer other operational, financial and programmatic advantages, in addition to meeting the long-term storage needs of the Libraries for the foreseeable future. The consortium members are committed to working together to provide the most efficient retrieval of materials in the facility. By jointly managing the facility and sharing its operational expenses, they will also make the most cost-effective use of its storage modules by, for example, minimizing the need to maintain unoccupied space and reducing some duplication of what is stored. Even more important are the programmatic benefits that the University will realize from building the facility in partnership with Princeton and the New York Public Library rather than alone. Columbia faculty and students will be able to page many of the materials stored by its partners for use on-site at Columbia's libraries. The experience gained from the facility, moreover, will facilitate further resource-sharing, one of the Libraries' strategic priorities, among the three consortium members and with other research libraries. As planning for the future proceeds, the partners will explore opportunities to take advantage of digital technologies to improve access and delivery and, potentially, to replace the need for some physical storage with digital files.
While the off-site facility represents the long-term answer to how the Libraries should house its growing collections, the University could not afford to wait until 2001-02 to address the overcrowded conditions in several of its library stacks. Immediate measures were needed to reduce the volumes held in Butler and Avery and to open up space for new acquisitions in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML). The Libraries have, therefore, contracted with a vendor to provide an interim storage facility to accommodate 300,000 volumes currently housed in the Butler public stacks and RBML. Over the summer of 1998, 130,000 volumes were transferred from Butler to the interim site, and another 170,000 will be moved by the end of the 1998-99 academic year. By reducing the overall fill level of Butler stacks to 85 percent, these transfers should accommodate the library's projected needs until the permanent facility is ready. All of the volumes stored at the interim site are being barcoded and added to CLIO so that they can be moved directly to the permanent storage facility when it opens. Daily deliveries during the work week assure users of normally receiving materials within 24 hours.
To reduce the congestion in the Avery stacks, the Libraries has transferred 6,000 volumes to a temporary storage site on campus and reconfigured collections to maximize the use of Avery storage areas and compact shelving. To address the overcrowding in some of the science libraries, the most frequently used mathematics materials in the Math/Science Library were reorganized over the summer of 1998, thereby enabling a transfer to its stacks of older reference materials from other science branch libraries.
As noted earlier, overcrowding has increased the workload of the staff responsible for maintaining the stacks and has reduced the efficacy of shelf maintenance. To address these problems, the Libraries has significantly reorganized the stack maintenance functions in Butler and has redesigned work routines and position descriptions in all libraries. In addition, the Libraries has utilized some of the incremental operating funds it has received to add the equivalent of eight staff positions for shelving, shelfreading and related activities (5.5 in Butler, 1 each in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts and the Lehman Social Sciences Libraries and 0.5 in the C.V. Starr East Asian Library). These additions have increased the total number of staff hours devoted to stack maintenance by approximately 25 percent. In combination with the reorganization of those functions and the reductions in overcrowding made possible by the interim storage facility, they will speed up the process of reshelving and make it easier for users to find materials in the stacks.
The Libraries will employ the following performance objectives for its stack maintenance operations:
Book Stacks
Current Periodical Shelves
These standards are comparable to those used by libraries at other research universities. In the context of Columbia's overcrowded shelves, it is especially important to ensure that all of them are achieved. Otherwise, the shelves will quickly become disorderly and materials hard to find.
For known and predictable workloads, the new staffing levels and organization are designed to enable the Libraries to adhere to its performance objectives. However, the transition period before completion of the off-site facility is likely to be a difficult one, and the Libraries will need to monitor the situation closely, especially in Butler. Since it is relatively easy to quantify stack maintenance "output" and observe the condition of the stacks, the Libraries will use the routine performance measures it has developed to evaluate their condition on an on-going basis. In spring 1998, the Libraries conducted a survey of a random sample of its shelves that has provided benchmark data on the condition of the stacks. The survey included observations of such conditions as books out of order, levels of overcrowding, cleanliness and the general physical conditions of the shelves. The survey will be repeated regularly to monitor the effectiveness of the current plan for maintaining shelves in a usable, orderly condition.
Physical Condition of the Stacks
Improvements to the physical condition of the stacks will form an essential part of the overall effort to make the library collections more accessible. Several major projects have already been completed or are underway. As part of the Butler renovation, the HVAC systems have been upgraded and three of the public stack tiers have been renovated, with better lighting, new sprinklers, cleaning of books, improved reader seating, and installation of CLIO terminals. By June 2000, an additional two stack tiers will be renovated, and the remainder will be refurbished by 2004. The Kent Hall HVAC renovation, completed in 1993 and supplemented by additional humidity control equipment added last summer, brought the Starr East Asian Library stacks up to standards necessary to protect library materials. A similar $1.2 million HVAC project in Avery was completed in summer 1998.
Before physically accessing materials, users must find them in the catalog. Most of the collections can now be located through CLIO, including more than half of the older volumes whose catalog records have been converted from a physical card into electronic form. There are, however, still 870,000 records for pre-1970 volumes that are maintained only in the card catalog. These materials represent an underutilized resource. They are also more expensive to manage, since catalog cards are significantly more costly and more difficult to handle than machine readable records. In addition, CLIO enables item-tracking when materials are circulating or otherwise being handled, thereby further improving access to materials. While steady progress is being made to reduce this backlog, at prior rates of conversion the collections would not have been fully accessible through CLIO until 2020. The Libraries now plans to accelerate the process and complete the retrospective conversion by 2007. The conversion of 210,000 titles will be done as part of the plans to transfer materials to the off-site storage facilities. The remaining 660,000 titles will be entered into CLIO at an expected rate of approximately 100,000 per year, through a capital investment of $2.7 million. In general, titles will be converted by subject area, with the earliest attention given to those fields that make the heaviest use of older materials.
Recognizing the importance of the Libraries' physical space to its ability to support learning and research and the overall quality of life for students and faculty, the University invested $45.4 million between fiscal year 1995 and fiscal year 1999 in capital improvements in its facilities. Most of that sum was committed to the first two phases of the Butler renovation. In addition, the Music and Arts Library in Dodge Hall was entirely reconstructed, more than doubling its overall space and seating, and providing it with the most modern audio and visual equipment; the HVAC systems in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library were upgraded; and many of the other branch libraries, most notably Physics, benefitted from smaller refurbishment projects. The University's new Five-Year Capital Plan commits another $32.9 million, and the Graduate School of Business will invest $2.2 million in the Thomas J. Watson Business and Economics Library that serves its faculty and students.
The largest portion of these capital investments will be committed to Butler Library, Columbia's flagship library and the largest building on the Morningside Heights campus, which has figured prominently in the experience and memories of countless Columbia graduates who have passed through its doors. Just as Low Library, the original library, is a visual symbol of Columbia for many in the University community, Butler is the symbolic representation of the educational life of the campus. In recognition of Butler's central role, the University has already committed $42.2 million to restoring its original grandeur while modernizing its facilities and making them technologically capable of providing easy access to the full range of new electronic resources. The 2000-04 Capital Plan commits a further $28 million for the project.
By the completion of the first phase of the renovation in December 1997, Butler had a new mechanical plant, air-conditioned stacks, one renovated public stack tier, and a new telecommunications center. The library's technical services were also consolidated into renovated space on the first floor, thereby making way for expanded public use of the higher floors. The second, more visible phase of the renovation began in January 1998. By its completion in June 2000, all of Floors 2 and 3 will be renovated, as well as four additional stack tiers.
The first of the renovated public spaces was opened on the 200 level in fall 1998, thereby making visible the extraordinary benefits students and faculty will derive from the Butler project. The beautiful ornamented entrance lobby has been restored, as have the elegant reading rooms that ring the second floor, including spaces that have not been open to the public for decades. These renovated reading rooms are part of the Philip L. Milstein Family College Library which will extend over Butler's second, third and fourth floors. A coffee bar and lounge have also been created on the 200 level to provide students with social space; a new instructional technology lab has been opened as part of the Butler New Media Center; and the AcIS Computer Lab has been upgraded and expanded.
By the end of the second phase in June 2000, the remaining spaces on the 200 and 300 levels will be fully renovated. Additional reading rooms will be refurbished and upgraded; further training and lab spaces will be opened; the Wien Reference Room will be redesigned and the Circulation area restored; and the Electronic Text Service will be expanded. All told, the square footage devoted to undergraduate study and social space will be expanded from 26,000 square feet to over 42,000 square feet; seating will more than double; and each seat will be equipped with power and data outlets for laptop use.
Funded by the University's new capital plan, the third phase of the Butler renovation program will begin in July 2000 and extend through spring 2004. This phase will complete the Philip L. Milstein Family College Library with restored and renovated reading rooms on the 400 level. A combined current periodicals and microform reading room will extend for the entire east wing of the 400 level. Phase III will also include the development of graduate research reading rooms on the fifth and sixth floors, the renovation of the public elevators, and the refurbishment of the remaining public stack areas. The research reading rooms, modeled after the successful pilot reading room devoted to Ancient and Medieval Studies, will provide attractive, comfortable reading spaces along with carefully selected non-circulating collections drawn from the Butler stacks. The interdisciplinary thematic collections in each reading room will be selected to meet the needs of faculty and graduate students in various areas of the Humanities, making readily available those materials that are in the heaviest demand. Faculty and librarians are currently developing proposals for the thematic areas to be covered by the renovated reading rooms.
The new capital plan earmarks another $2.9 million for the renovation of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, including the development of additional space on the 100 level, renovation of reader space in the drawings collection, and refurbishment of the original reading room. Another $700,000 will be devoted to further enhancements in the renovated Rare Book and Manuscript Library (RBML). Plans for RBML include rewiring for added access to electronic resources and enhancements to security systems as well as repainting and refinishing of the library's floors, tables and other surfaces. In the summer of 1998, the Libraries and the Graduate Business School began to refurbish the main reading room of the Thomas J. Watson Business and Economics Library in Uris Hall. With funding provided by the School, the project will be expanded to include the addition of a mezzanine around the perimeter of the reading room to create additional seating for users of the library. That work is currently scheduled for summer 1999. Finally, a total of $1.3 million, or $260,000 per year, will be allocated for more modest projects throughout the Libraries that will upgrade furniture, improve stack areas through cleaning and shifting, and ensure that necessary painting and repairs are maintained.
Recruiting and Retaining Library Staff
High quality professional staff is an essential prerequisite for all successful library programs. While the Libraries has been successful in recruiting and retaining highly skilled and motivated personnel, it does face the challenge of maintaining a salary pool that will allow it to remain competitive with its peers. In addition, it faces the more specific need of recruiting talented mid-career librarians to fill key openings without creating salary inequities between them and existing staff.
Despite a tightly constrained budget, the Libraries has kept salaries comparable to those of its peer libraries in the Northeast, as demonstrated by the following figures:
| Position | New England | Middle Atlantic | Columbia |
| Assistant Director | $85,787 | $72,569 | $71,809 |
| Functional Specialist | 45,049 | 43,146 | 40,930 |
| Subject Specialist | 50,587 | 47,339 | 46,319 |
| Department Head | 57,990 | 53,620 | 58,109 |
| Referencing/Cataloging: | |||
| Over 14 years experience | 48,330 | 45,532 | 47,557 |
| 10-14 years experience | 42,922 | 40,521 | 46,618 |
| 5-9 years experience | 39,622 | 36,300 | 39,640 |
| Under 5 years experience | 34,696 | 31,204 | 34,849 |
| New England: Boston, Brown, Connecticut, Dartmouth, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts, Yale |
| Middle Atlantic: Columbia; Cornell; New York; Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania State; Pittsburgh; Princeton; Rochester; Rutgers; State University of New York: Albany, Buffalo, Stony Brook; Syracuse; Temple |
Since fiscal year 1992, the Libraries has had to resort to staff reductions to create a sufficient salary pool to recruit and retain at a competitive level. Many of these reductions have been permitted by the productivity gains achieved through new uses of information technologies or the creative reorganization of staff responsibilities. With current technology and the growing demands placed on the Libraries' staff, there are few savings left to be achieved either through automation or staff reorganizations. Therefore, the Libraries has increased its salary budget for fiscal year 1999, and will make further adjustments over the following five years, to create a salary pool that will reward merit and maintain the Libraries' competitive position with its peers without further staff reduction.
Each year, the Libraries evaluates its salaries through comparison with data from the ARL and especially from eight peer libraries with which it annually exchanges historical information. The size of the incremental investments in salaries is predicated on the assumption that the patterns exhibited in the data from these sources for the past five years will not materially change. The Libraries will, therefore, continue to track the salary increases at other libraries and will annually evaluate the appropriateness of its own merit pool on the basis of those data.
Enhancing Access to Digital Resources
Investments in the digital library are important strategically for the University's future information services. Columbia ranks among the leaders in digital library development, but that position is vulnerable in a fast-changing field where rapid advances are commonplace. The Libraries and AcIS have helped to develop a range of innovative projects at Columbia, but the number of new projects is now growing at a rate that has outstripped their staffs' ability to support them. Maintaining an effective digital library program, therefore, will require additional staff.
AcIS will add two new positions in fiscal year 1999 to work on the digital library infrastructure, as discussed later in this document. The Libraries has also created a new position through a combination of staff reallocations and new funding to support digital imaging projects that will enable it to take advantage of external funds and special opportunities available for such efforts. For example, the new staff are assisting members of the faculty to develop the Advanced Papyrological Information System (an effort partially funded by NEH) and will provide expanded support for the Digital Scriptorium, a multi-institutional effort to provide records and images for medieval manuscripts on-line. They have also allowed the Libraries and AcIS to begin planning for other grant-supported projects, such as the dissemination of the John Jay Papers electronically and the creation of a digital library of selected archives and drawings from the Avery collections. Finally, the new staff will participate in the on-going program that the Libraries and AcIS have initiated to ensure the preservation of the collections' digital resources.
With the increasing requirements for electronic information delivery, the Libraries has vastly increased the inventory of workstations and other computing equipment it maintains for public use. The number of microcomputers alone has grown from 426 in mid-1995 to 619 in 1999. These workstations are part of an equipment base that also includes 189 public and staff CLIO terminals, all of which need to be replaced by microcomputers, as well as 715 printers and 186 barcode readers. At the same time that the equipment base has been expanding, upgrade cycles have shortened, largely as a result of the requirements of new software releases. For example, most of the Libraries' existing CD-ROM workstations support only text-based interfaces and not the Windows 95 operating system which is now a prerequisite for new CD-ROM database products. While all of the Libraries' equipment will not require replacement on the same cycle, it will need to be upgraded regularly to meet the technical requirements of the databases on which users rely. In recent years, the Libraries has allocated $200,000 a year for equipment purchases. In light of its growing needs, it has now increased funding for this purpose to $300,000.
The Libraries has relied upon maintenance contracts for the timely repair of hardware. Otherwise, the responsibility for supporting the growing equipment base -- trouble-shooting; the selection, ordering and installation of new equipment; replacing machines that are beyond repair and software installation and support -- has fallen on a technical staff that numbered only three FTE in 1998. This year, the Libraries has created an additional technical position to help manage the growing workload required to maintain its public access computing equipment. Among the initial tasks that have been assigned to the new staff person is the responsibility of ensuring that the equipment is Year 2000 compatible. With this new position, the Libraries will also be able to eliminate a backlog of order requests and installations for computer equipment that had accumulated over the last 18 months, and keep up with the growth in service requests expected in the near future. This will permit the Libraries to add to and upgrade the computing equipment it maintains for its users in a timely manner, thereby assuring ready access to electronic information resources that routinely require the latest versions of hardware and software for their delivery.
The new capital plan also enables the Libraries to upgrade its CLIO equipment base and to provide enhancements to LibraryWeb and CLIO Plus. Over the next 30 months, the Libraries will replace all of its older text-only CLIO and CLIO Plus terminals with workstations that enable graphical Web access. Other high priority enhancements for CLIO include enabling readers to view on-line a list of items they have checked out in CLIO, and improving functionality in the Web version of CLIO.
In addition to making it easier to use CLIO, these improvements are also necessary precursors to the eventual replacement of the vendor-supported software on which it is based. As CLIO and most other library catalog management systems in operation today were developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they do not take advantage of recent technology innovations that could provide users with more powerful features and allow for productivity gains in "back office" processing. They, nonetheless, are still the best options available for very large research libraries. The next-generation systems are still in the early stages of development and cannot deliver the functionality Columbia needs. At present, therefore, the Libraries does not expect to replace CLIO during the 2000-04 capital plan. It is, however, carefully monitoring software development and the experience of its peers and may need to reconsider its decision to postpone the introduction of a new system if the product offerings significantly improve or the willingness of CLIO's vendor to support it diminishes.
AcIS is dedicated to improving the quality of instruction and research at the University through the strategic use of computing and communications technologies.(2)
2. AcIS does not support the administrative information requirements of the University. That is the responsibility of Administrative Information Services (AIS) which manages the University's central administrative computers, provides departments and schools with mainframe, microcomputer and Novell LAN services, and operates the ROLM telephone system.)
It pursues that mission by providing core computing, networking, and information services for the Columbia community in the most cost-effective way, and by introducing innovative technological resources and techniques to support the academic activities of the University. AcIS is responsible for the information infrastructure on the Morningside campus and maintains many of the central networked services, including the central e-mail system and Columbia's World Wide Web, on which the University depends. It manages the central microcomputer labs, electronic classrooms and public workstations located on the Morningside campus; works with the Libraries to expand the University's growing array of on-line information resources; supports the efforts of individual departments and schools to use information technologies for academic purposes; and offers a range of services to individual faculty and students.
To fulfill its mission, AcIS requires a highly qualified and motivated staff. Without personnel who are skilled in the latest technologies and capable of applying them for academic purposes, AcIS cannot effectively support the University's educational and research programs. No less important are the technologies themselves. As those technologies evolve and reliance upon them grows, AcIS must make sure that the University possesses an information infrastructure that can meet the rapidly expanding and ever more complex needs of faculty and students.
In both of these vital areas, AcIS' task has become more complicated in recent years. The demands on the AcIS staff have grown much more rapidly than its size, and the greater salaries its personnel can command in industry have increased the attractiveness of careers outside of the University. Together, these factors have made it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain staff. The pace of technological innovation has continued to accelerate, as has the rate at which faculty and students use the new technologies. As a consequence, equipment that may have served the University well only a few years ago either has become inadequate or is facing obsolescence in the near future. Thus, enhancements in both its staff and the technologies it deploys represent the highest priorities for AcIS over the next six years. In addition, it will use the increased resources it has been allocated to further three other objectives: 1) the continued development of the digital library and on-line information services; 2) the expansion and strengthening of the University's academic technology facilities; and 3) improvements in the level and quality of the support provided to the users of its services.
Recruiting and Retaining AcIS Staff
Faculty and student reliance on the new information technologies has been growing at an extraordinary rate. Since 1991, the user community AcIS serves had increased eight-fold to over 33,000 by 1997. Over the same period, requests to the e-mail consultant have risen more than four-fold to 14,000, while calls to the Support Center have been growing at an annual rate of 25-30 percent to more than 37,000. Network use has also exploded. The number of systems attached to the Morningside network rose from 3,700 in 1994 to over 23,000 in 1998 and the number of calls made to the AcIS modem pools in a week grew from 28,000 per week in 1995 to 120,000 in 1998.
Other measures of use show similar patterns. The number of e-mail messages transmitted in a week rose from 38,000 in 1991 to 800,000 in 1998 and the number of hits on ColumbiaWeb increased from 100,000 per week in 1994 to 9 million per week by the end of 1998. These statistics reflect a material expansion in the scope and variety of services AcIS offers as well as the levels at which they are used. Today, AcIS provides many services that did not exist early in the decade, including ColumbiaWeb, Residence Hall networking, and electronic classrooms. Others, such as the network itself, provision of e-mail service and storage, support for instructional use of computing, and user support services, have evolved into much larger and more complex operations.
The exploding demands on AcIS' services have far outpaced the growth in the personnel required to support them. From 1991 to June 1998, the number of professional FTEs increased by only 39 percent from 41.8 to 58.1. As a result, the AcIS staff found it increasingly difficult to maintain satisfactory levels of service or to keep up with the rapidly changing technologies, as they must to meet the information needs of faculty and students.
The disjunction between the growth in demand and personnel aggravated the already complicated task of recruiting and retaining a staff that is highly marketable and can choose from many professional opportunities in the commercial as well as the academic world. In recent years, the AcIS salary structure increasingly placed it at a competitive disadvantage with peer institutions as well as with industry. With increases in the salary pool that averaged 3 to 3.5 percent annually, beginning programmers in 1997-98 were earning $36,000, well below their counterparts at many peer universities where the entry-level salaries for programmers ranged up to $40,000. Similar disparities had emerged at the more senior levels where the average salaries among the AcIS staff were as much as $10,000 less than those paid to their counterparts at peer institutions. The differences with the salaries in the commercial sector were even more striking. Comparable positions in industry commanded salaries that were 50 to 75 percent higher, if not more, than those that AcIS could pay. Recent Engineering graduates, for example, were receiving starting salaries as high as $60,000 from commercial firms.
Due to this combination of forces, AcIS faced increasing turnover among its experienced personnel and increasing difficulty in recruiting new staff. The turnover rate in 1997 reached 14 percent, compared to less than 8 percent in the preceding two years, while the length of time needed to fill vacancies rose from 4.9 months in 1995 to 8.2 in 1997.
AcIS is implementing a four-pronged strategy to ameliorate these problems:
Together, these measures will allow AcIS to compete for younger talent; create professionally satisfying career paths within Columbia for those it does recruit; use the vacancies resulting from the losses it experiences to promote the best of its staff to successively more demanding and rewarding positions; and provide leadership challenges to personnel at higher levels that make an academic setting more attractive than more lucrative positions in industry.
AcIS cannot compete for talent solely on the basis of salary, nor should it try. Given the greater resources of potential employers in the commercial sector, they will always be able to offer higher levels of compensation. These circumstances call for a more creative approach to recruiting and career advancement within AcIS. Such an approach accepts that a portion of the staff will leave each year for higher paying positions in banking, finance and other corporate fields and utilizes that fact to build a stronger staff. It takes advantage of turnover as a means of opening new opportunities for the best of the AcIS staff and creating vacancies that can be filled by individuals with the expertise to meet the University's rapidly evolving information needs.
AcIS groups its technical positions into four categories: Systems Programmers, User Services Consultants, Programmer Analysts and Network Analysts. There are five grades in each category. The first four grades differ mostly in terms of personal skills, experience and degree of self-sufficiency. None necessarily require managing other staff. The fifth grade is distinguished from the other four by involving management responsibilities. Traditionally, AcIS promoted staff through the first three grades every two to three years, based on growing professional expertise as well as performance. Promotions to the fourth, or senior, grade were given only to those staff members who exhibited an exceptional level of ability meriting special recognition.
Through its annual review process, AcIS will now promote staff with outstanding performance more rapidly through the first four grades, as often as annually. Promotion to the senior grade will continue to be reserved for individuals with exceptional skills, experience and the ability to work independently. Such a career path should make AcIS jobs more competitive with industry and at least as attractive as our peer institutions, both in terms of salary and job responsibilities. To further recognize the excellence of the best of its staff, AcIS will use the upper end of the promotional raises allowed by the University in its merit raise program.
Improved Professional Development
The challenge and enjoyment of working with new technology to create systems that serve the user community is a key to building a loyal, dedicated and stable staff. The University offers unique opportunities to the members of the AcIS staff for professional development that industry cannot match. They can enjoy the intellectual excitement of the University, work with some of the most creative minds on projects of great intellectual interest and importance, learn new technologies and contribute to their development. If properly promoted, these opportunities will make positions in AcIS attractive career alternatives to more lucrative but less intellectually challenging jobs in the commercial sector. Thus, staff development is an integral part of the AcIS strategy for competing for the type of talent the University requires.
As part of their normal work life, staff members will be given greater opportunities to keep up with new technologies and to be involved in the design and deployment of innovations in the University's information systems. The Libraries and AcIS will expand their training programs and for that purpose have added a new position as Director of Training and Staff Development which has now been filled. AcIS will also seek to create new opportunities for its staff to participate in the academic creativity of the University by actively marketing its services to the increasing numbers of faculty and departments engaged in instructional and research projects that require the skills it can provide.
Improved Competitiveness in Compensation
While AcIS cannot rely on salary alone, it cannot expect to recruit and retain highly skilled staff without offering a level of compensation that is competitive with those at peer institutions and reduces the substantial differentials with pay scales in the information technology industry. To help attract new staff, AcIS raised the starting salaries for programmers by 11 percent to $40,000 and for technical support positions by 6.25 percent to $34,000, effective July 1, 1998. As noted earlier, the new entry salaries compare well with those of other universities, although they still lag behind the starting salaries of $55,000 or more that are common in industry. In addition, AcIS adjusted the salaries of existing staff by an average of 10.5 percent. Individual adjustments were based on merit and took account of the higher starting salaries AcIS now offers. Some were accompanied by promotions in rank. These increases have resulted in AcIS paying salaries that are more competitive with those offered at peer universities, thereby reducing, if not eliminating, the previous disparities that have prompted some staff departures in the recent past.
To maintain salaries at a comparable level to peer institutions and to reduce the rate at which they are falling behind industry standards, AcIS will increase its annual merit pool for professional staff from 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent. As described above, under the new career development model, the best of the professional staff in the lower grades will also receive rapid promotions in their first years of service. Since each advancement in grade will be accompanied by a promotional increase, the new career model will also result in a significant increase in salary for the best of the AcIS technical staff, thereby enhancing Columbia's competitiveness with other universities and reducing the salary disparities with the corporate world.
To improve the delivery of the services it offers, AcIS has added 11 new FTEs to the staff of four groups -- Computing Systems; Computing Support Services; Academic Technologies; and Research, Development and Information Services -- since the start of the 1998-99 academic year. Nine of these FTEs will be filled by regular staff and two by student assistants. These additions are detailed below in the appropriate sections of this document. The new staff are also prerequisites for other actions that will make Columbia a more attractive place to work. By reducing workloads, they will free up time to master new technology and ideas and to apply them appropriately. Managers and senior staff will have more time to develop and implement the improved professional development and training opportunities described above, and junior staff will find it easier to take advantage of them.
The initial results of AcIS' new strategies for recruiting and retaining personnel have been encouraging. Since the introduction of the starting salary increases on July 1, 1998, AcIS has filled sixteen positions for both programmers and technical support staff. The average time needed to complete the searches has been 3.3 months, compared with 8.2 months in 1997 and 4.9 months in 1995. It is still too soon to state, with confidence, whether the new career development and compensation strategies will reduce turnover among AcIS' professional staff. However, none of those who left AcIS since the start of the 1998-99 academic year did so solely due to salary, and few cited better professional opportunities or new challenges as the reason for their decisions. Thus, experience to date suggests that the new strategies will have a positive effect on AcIS' ability to retain staff.
Network Infrastructure and Services
The campus network and central servers have assumed a critical role in the life of the University. Members of the Columbia community use them to communicate person-to-person via e-mail and to publish to the world on the Web. They connect faculty and students to the thousands of resources on the Web within the University and beyond -- from the electronic resources that make up the digital library to the Library of Congress and a host of other information resources. Students utilize them to determine course prerequisites and schedules; to obtain syllabi, notes, exercises and other materials for courses; to track their progress in fulfilling major requirements; to find an adviser; to obtain their grades and transcripts; to find jobs and decide upon careers; and to correspond with their families. Faculty rely upon them for scholarly correspondence, research, access to specialized computing and information resources, support for courses and, increasingly, on-line publication through innovative forums like CIAO (Columbia International Affairs On-line). Their importance to the University will only increase, as the revolution in information technology accelerates. Reliance on them will grow, with an increasing number of faculty, students and staff making more intensive use of an expanding range of services.
AcIS will need to undertake major enhancements in the network infrastructure and the central services over the next few years to keep up with the changing technology and the growth in their use. To ensure that they continue to serve the University well in the future, AcIS has adopted a four-part strategy:
The current network architecture on the Morningside campus is based on early 1990s technology. A key, and now limiting, characteristic of this technology is that users share its capacity. Any computer can send as much traffic as it can generate. While the network's capacity has been expanded and other steps taken to cope with its limitations, the current architecture has reached the end of its useful life. It can no longer provide reasonable service to all users and cannot carry the University into a future of high-speed desktop computers, high-volume digital video, e-commerce, and the Internet2. The number of workstations on the network has increased from 3,700 in 1994 to 23,000 in 1998. Each of these may now be a fast but inexpensive computer that can easily monopolize network capacity within a building or even across the campus backbone. An added drawback to the current architecture is that it allows malicious users to spy on data flowing to and from most workstations. The number, power and functions of computers on the network will continue to grow at a dramatic pace. As they do, these problems will become even more severe.
The Morningside campus network will, therefore, be re-engineered over the next four years at a total cost of $7.7 million into a new, state-of-the-art system that will solve the control, capacity, and security problems created by the current architecture. In place of network traffic sharing, it will guarantee every connection exclusive access to some portion of network bandwidth, thereby ensuring that no single device will be able to monopolize available capacity. It will permit a minimum 15-fold increase in the capacity of the connection from each building to the campus network and a six-fold increase in the capacity of the campus network itself. Together, these features will meet the University's networking requirements for the next seven to 10 years. In addition, it will allow AcIS to deliver new tools and applications not possible with the current architecture and to match network capacity to requirements as specific as those of a single workstation or as broad as an entire building. It will also provide the capacity and control features that are a requirement for the University's participation in Internet2.
The following table shows the bandwidth of typical connections for the current and new networks, and the potential for future growth allowed by the new architecture:
| Current Capacity | Proposed Capacity | Potential for Growth(3) | |
| Each User | Shared 10 Mbps(4) | Dedicated 10 Mbps | 100 Mbps |
| Building to Backbone | 10 Mbps | 1,000 Mbps | As required |
| Backbone | 100 Mbps | 6,000 Mbps | As required |
| (Mbps = Megabits per second) |
4. Ten Mbps is guaranteed
between any two devices in a building. Individual capacity on
connections outside a building and off-campus is limited by the
total capacity of the building and Internet connections.
These capacity estimates are based on the deployment of the most cost-efficient network protocol now available. However, both the technology and its pricing are rapidly changing. As other options that provide more capabilities become available, AcIS will be able to provide higher levels of service at a lower cost. Since the network design can accommodate multiple technologies, it will be possible to utilize those options as they become available without having to replace the protocols that are now being deployed.
The new architecture will require replacing the electronics that connect workstations to the building "hubs" and those hubs to the campus network. In total, AcIS will upgrade approximately 120 hubs around campus, giving the network the ability to handle at least double the current 18,000 connected devices. The upgrade will not include rewiring individual buildings since the current wiring can support dedicated 10 Mbps service. Future building renovations are, however, to include the installation of new wiring that can provide even greater bandwidth for individual workstations.
Work on the new network architecture began in summer 1998 and is projected to be completed in 2002. Each building will be upgraded as a unit. Work plans will be developed in cooperation with the units occupying the building, taking into consideration schedules and specific logistical needs. Disruptions in connectivity will be limited to the particular building being upgraded and should not be more than a few hours long. Individual departments will be permitted to fund added enhancements to meet the particular needs of its members, such as upgraded wiring and higher speed links.
Network traffic measurements on utilization and contention (packet collisions and delays) as well as other metrics specific to each level of service will be employed to monitor the effectiveness of the new architecture. They will also be used to plan for further upgrades that will anticipate future needs. For instance, in the case of building-to-backbone connections, AcIS anticipates that upgrade planning for a given link will be triggered when utilization reaches 70 percent of capacity. At the same time, developments on other Internet2 campuses will be closely followed through the Internet2 Committee on Network Measurement in order to benefit from the experience of peer institutions. These quantitative measures will be supplemented by surveys of user perceptions as buildings are converted to non-shared Ethernet.
Ensuring Wide-Area Connectivity
The new information technologies encourage a vastly expanded level of communication outside of as well as within the University. As faculty and student reliance upon external information resources has grown, so has the importance of providing them with the connections they need. To protect and enhance wide-area connectivity, AcIS will create backup links among the University's campuses and with the Internet. In addition, it will set up a special, very-high speed connection for the Internet2 project which will investigate new very high-speed technologies to support distance education, real-time interactive video simulation and other extremely data-intensive network applications.
While the network links among the University's campuses -- Morningside, Health Sciences, and Lamont -- and to the Internet have proven highly reliable in practice, they are not immune to disruption. Within the past two years, experience here and elsewhere in the country has shown that equipment failure, accidents, and human error can cause significant disruptions, even in networks that appear to be highly reliable. In February 1998, for example, equipment failures severed the connection between Morningside and Health Sciences for 25 hours. Similarly, the Columbia Internet link was out of service for three hours in July 1998 and another eight hours in October 1998. The University lacks secondary links to provide immediate backup service should any of the wide-area connections fail. AcIS minimized the disruption caused by the February 1998 failure of the Morningside-Health Sciences link by switching traffic to a experimental, testbed connection between the two campuses, but there were no alternatives available to cope with the Internet outages.
AcIS will, therefore, introduce dependable secondary connections among the University's campuses and to the Internet at an annual cost of $50,000. The capital costs for these links are included in the network upgrade plan. These backups will be T1 (1.5 Mbps) links that are permanently connected and routinely tested, ready for rapid switch-overs whenever the need arises. They will have a lower capacity than the primary connections. Each one will equal the capacity of the University's Internet connection in 1995. As a consequence, not every function or process will continue uninterrupted. Nonetheless, the links will permit AcIS to maintain critical basic services, such as e-mail, data transfer, and access to administrative programs, while the primary connections are restored.(5) The Lamont backup link was activated in July 1998; the other backups will all be in place by June 1999.
5. While moving inter-campus connections to the backup link can usually be accomplished rapidly, it will take several hours for the consequent changes in routing to propagate through the Internet and restore full access to all resources.
The second part of the wide-area strategy is to invest in a very high-capacity 155 Mbps link to bring NYSERNet 2000 and Internet2 and their next-generation networking technologies to the University. Columbia is one of 120 institutions that is participating in the design and development of Internet2 whose technologies, or ones similar to them, are expected to replace the current Internet in the future. In addition to their use in research, the Internet2 technologies will enable distance education; full-motion interactive video conferencing between participating institutions; interactive visual simulations; access to archives of images, video, sound and numerical databases for instruction and scholarship; and other very high-volume, data-intensive transactions. Additionally, once they are operational, users of the Internet will enjoy much faster connections in all of their communications with other Internet2 member institutions. Finally, their deployment will also provide extremely useful experience in anticipation of the commercial Internet's moving to Internet2-like speeds and management capabilities in the next two to three years.
The high-capacity link is a condition for Columbia's participation in Internet2. It is also a requirement for the University to receive a $350,000 share of a two-year NSF grant to the NYSERNet 2000 coalition that is building the New York State NYSERNet 2000 network. Participating institutions are responsible for the cost of connecting to the nearest Internet2 point of presence. Part of the funding from the NSF grant will be used to pay for Columbia's connection for the first two years. Starting in 2000-01, AcIS will absorb all the costs of the Internet2 connection, which are projected to be $175,000 a year, in its own budget.
Off-campus access to Columbia's electronic resources has become an increasingly important requirement for students, faculty and administrators. To serve this need, AcIS increased the number of modems from 82 in 1993 to 298 by fall 1997, of which 282 could be used for unlimited access to the campus network. The remaining 16 formed an express pool that can only be used for 25-minute sessions. The newer modems, moreover, operate at higher speeds, thereby decreasing the amount of time needed to access information and increasing the number of users each can support.
Demand for access, however, has grown at an even faster pace, swamping the available capacity. The number of users has grown to more than 12,000, while user sessions have been increasing in recent years at an annual rate of approximately 38 percent. As a consequence, the modem pool effectively operated in the 1997-98 academic year at 100 percent of capacity between 9 a.m. and 1 a.m. In a typical week, over 7,300 users successfully placed 90,000 calls into the pool. Chronic complaints about busy signals strongly suggest that usage would have been substantially higher if additional capacity had been available.
Due to the difficulty of using the modem pool, it received the lowest rating among the services evaluated in the faculty survey conducted by the Provost's Office in spring 1998. Nearly two-thirds of the faculty who responded were somewhat or highly dissatisfied with the service provided.
Demand for off-campus access will undoubtedly continue to grow at a rapid pace for the foreseeable future. The potential user pool of students (principally graduate students since undergraduates, with the exception of those in General Studies, live in the residence halls which are wired to the campus Ethernet), faculty and staff is more than twice the number who currently use it. Additionally, the amount of access each individual will need will increase, as the array of services offered on-line expands and users become more dependent on the network.
The pressure on the modem pool has been compounded by the drawbacks of the available alternatives. While the University's networks can be accessed through Internet Service Providers (ISPs), they are a less cost-efficient mechanism for providing free access than the modem pool. More seriously, individuals who relied upon an ISP in the past did not have access to the full range of University resources, such as some on-line journals like J-Stor, that were available to those who connected to the network through the modem pool. Other alternatives are even more problematic. AcIS has cooperated with the Office of Institutional Real Estate to extend the campus Ethernet into a few of the residential buildings it manages for students in the Morningside neighborhood. However, the cost of wiring all University apartments would be prohibitively expensive. The cost of high-speed data connections -- ISDN and ADSL lines -- are about three times those of an ISP and often more. Cable TV modems will not be available in upper Manhattan before 2000 and are similarly expensive.
There are no easy answers to the dilemma created by these conditions. There is an urgent need to upgrade the modem pool. However, AcIS would face rapidly escalating and financially unmanageable costs if it were to rely exclusively on increasing the number of modems as the answer to the problems with the pool. It will, therefore, supplement the investments it will make in additional modems with other measures designed to promote the use of ISPs and to encourage a more rational use of the modem pool.
To meet current needs for remote access, AcIS installed 184 new, high-speed digital modems during summer and fall 1998. The Business School funded a further 92 modems for the exclusive use of its students, faculty and staff, who constituted 11 percent of modem users in 1997-98. These upgrades will continue through spring 1999 when all 298 of the older modems will be replaced with 460 new modems. At that point, a total of 644 new, 56Kbps V.90 modems will be available in the general pool and another 92 in the Business School pool. As part of the upgrade, AcIS will also convert current, less reliable analog telephone lines to the digital service required for 56 Kbps modems. The cost of these improvements will be $250,000 in the current fiscal year. Beginning in July 1999, annual line costs will be $100,000, and upgrade and maintenance costs $150,000.
At the current levels of 120,000 calls per week, these investments will bring the ratio of users per modem down from 40-to-1 to 17-to-1 in the general University pool and to 12-to-1 for the Business School pool. At those ratios, users will see a noticeable improvement in off-campus access. However, the improvement is likely to be short-lived in the absence of other efforts to make the network more accessible through other means or to constrain the expected growth in the usage of the modem pool. The expansion in the number of available modems since spring 1998 was accompanied by a jump in the number of weekly users from 7,300 to 8,800 and in the number of successful calls per week from 90,000 to 120,000. While future rates of growth may not be as steep, there is no reason to think that they will flatten out entirely.
To expand the availability of access, AcIS will encourage units with a special need for off-campus connections to the network to follow the example of the Business School and fund separate pools of their own. In addition to providing the level of access required by the units themselves, dedicated pools will help relieve the pressure on the central pool.
For some users ISPs may be a preferred alternative, now that they can be assured of full access to University resources available through the network. Even after the modem upgrade is completed, ISPs will continue to offer higher call-success rates and may be less costly for individuals living outside of New York City than paying the long-distance telephone charges generated by using the pool. To enhance the attractiveness of ISPs, AcIS modified its Web server in summer 1998 to make virtually all of the LibraryWeb's restricted resources available to those who connect through an ISP and identify themselves as a Columbia user. AcIS has also negotiated a special agreement with IBM's Global Network to provide Columbia students and personnel with Internet access at discounted rates through any of more than 1,000 phone numbers around the world. As the communications industry introduces new technologies, further options for accessing the network may develop in the next few years, such as relying upon cable TV or special telephone data lines. AcIS will monitor these developments and inform the University community of those that become viable, cost-effective alternatives to the modem pool.
Even with the availability of these alternatives, the growth in demand for access may simply be too great for the expanded modem pool to accommodate. AcIS, therefore, will carefully monitor changing patterns of reliance on the modem pool. For that purpose, it has deployed a tracking system to collect and analyze statistical information on use of the modem pool by user characteristics. With these analyses in hand, it will develop plans by the end of 1999 for constraining demand through limitations on use or by charging fees, which it will need to deploy once the ratio of users to modems passes 20-to-1 to avoid a recurrence of conditions that made it so difficult to use the modem pool in the recent past. Those plans could reflect several different options whose relative merits and disadvantages will need to be carefully explored. A temporary programmer will be hired for up to a year, as necessary, to evaluate the different options and develop alternative plans based upon them. Before deciding which ones to adopt, AcIS will consult widely with users of the modem pool both to determine their preferences and assess the impact of the changes under consideration.
Networked Services and Systems
AcIS systems provide a host of on-line services, including free e-mail, web servers, the digital library, University-wide information services, the authoritative central user directory and authentication/authorization service, timesharing, and file storage. The hardware and software that deliver these services need to be continually enhanced to accommodate the University's growing dependence on them and to utilize new technological developments to expand their range. For example, e-mail traffic continues to grow at 36 percent a year, requiring more powerful mail servers. The amount of information in personal, e-mail, and Web files on AcIS servers has grown rapidly as more offices and individuals use e-mail and publish on-line, requiring investments in file storage, server, and backup systems. Improvements in the user directory and authentication/authorization service are critical to expanding use of the Web to deliver a range of sensitive information from grades to restricted course bulletin boards to accepting payments over the net.
The fourth focus of AcIS' network strategy, therefore, is to continue to improve the capacity and reliability of on-line services by upgrading central servers and adding staff dedicated to support them. In the past, upgrades have been funded out of the AcIS capital budget even though they represented recurring annual needs. They will now be treated as operating expenses to provide the flexibility and financial base needed for better long-term planning. The AcIS operating budget for fiscal year 1999 includes $100,000 to cover the cost of replacements and enhancements to the University's central servers and storage systems in addition to $200,000 in capital funds available for the year from the current capital plan. Over the next five years, the operating budget will include approximately $300,000 per year to cover such replacements and enhancements. More importantly, AcIS will be able to adjust the amount it does spend, within the constraints of its overall operating budget, in response to changing needs and opportunities. Current plans call for upgrading several servers and file systems including more powerful mailhubs, redundant Web servers for increased reliability, a duplicate web authentication broker, a larger net-news server and file system, expanded user and Web file systems, and improved backup software and systems.
In addition to changing the funding mechanism for the University's central servers and storage systems, AcIS has reorganized the functional group that supports them and has dedicated additional staff positions to their support. The Computing Systems UNIX Group has been subdivided into a UNIX Systems Administration Group and a UNIX Systems Development Group. The first manages the daily operation of all central servers and systems, while the second is responsible for enhancing the software they use to support existing operations more effectively and to meet new needs. This division of labor will increase the efficiency of both functions, allowing system administrators to concentrate on the smooth operation of systems and the developers to focus on improvement and innovation. A new staff position was added to the UNIX Systems Development Group to expand support for the authentication/authorization database and its directory services. In addition, a second position has been reallocated to the UNIX Systems Administration Group from the Information Services Group to centralize Web server support.
Information Services and the Digital Library
The digital library comprises AcIS' sustained effort, in concert with the Libraries, AIS and information producers, to develop easy-to-use, uniform means of using on-line resources at Columbia and on the Internet. Building on mechanisms that were invented for the text-only version of ColumbiaNet and moved to the Web, the digital library is the primary on-line information interface for the University, delivering scholarly, instructional, research, administrative and personal information.
AcIS has led the development of this interlocking set of services that support electronic information delivery and organization at Columbia. It provides the University community with a wide range of general-purpose Web services and collaborates closely with many academic and administrative units in developing Web pages. It has developed the capacity to create large content applications, such as the new on-line directory of University classes, the Faculty Advising System (ASC), the Core Curriculum materials and the new Columbia International Affairs On-line (CIAO) from the Columbia University Press. In addition, its research and development staff play key roles in the creation of scholarly collections in the Libraries and in the development of the public-access control infrastructures used by AIS, Human Resources and Student Services on-line applications. Over the next few years, the continued development of these services will remain an AcIS priority.
As the range and number of digital library and information services continue to expand, the University will need an increasingly sophisticated and robust infrastructure to support them. AcIS has added two new positions to facilitate their further development. One position, in the UNIX Systems Development Group, supports the directory and authentication/authorization service, mentioned in the earlier section of this document on network services. Directory services encompass a wide range of functions related to the user database, including authentication, security, account management and a variety of related functions.
The second position has been added to the Research, Development and Information Services Group to support Web integration services, including the application of database technologies to the Web, audit and statistical tools and archiving services. These services include the software, database tools and automated management processes that enable creation of and access to the ever-expanding array of ColumbiaWeb resources. Management and continued development of the digital library also require statistical and usage information that takes advantage of the contents of the user database. Finally, ensuring enduring access to digital files requires an archival program that will provide secure, reliable storage and will maintain files in a form that can be used even as technology changes.
Instructional and Academic Technology Facilities
Enhancements in the University's academic technology facilities represent a fourth objective for AcIS. It will make significant investments over the next six years in upgrading and expanding computing labs; ColumbiaNet stations in libraries, lobbies and lounges; printers; and multimedia equipment in electronic classrooms. In addition, AcIS has added two new positions to improve the management of the equipment in public places and a third to support the use of multimedia technologies in instruction.
Expanding and Updating Public Facilities
AcIS manages microcomputer labs, printing stations and various other clusters of equipment that provide public computing and access to the University's information services. In response to growing student need and the recommendations of a presidential committee on student services, it has made expanding that access one of its key priorities over the past four years. At the start of the 1998-99 academic year, it operated 422 public workstations and 25 networked printers, in comparison to only 188 workstations and 8 printers in 1993-94.
Demand for technologically advanced facilities, nonetheless, continues to grow at a rapid pace with requests for more equipment, longer hours of operation in computer labs and 24-hour locations for public access. To meet that demand, AcIS will invest $995,000 over the next five years to increase the number of public workstations, replace older equipment and introduce new, faster network technology. During the summer of 1998, it replaced 77 outdated workstations. In fall 1998, it opened new computer labs and other facilities on the 200 level of Butler Library, replacing the previous 14 workstations with more modern ones and adding a further 33 new workstations and printers. By the end of 1998, AcIS also added another 24 new ColumbiaNet stations around campus. In 1999-2000, the Lerner Student Center will open with 46 workstations in computer clusters and public kiosks. (In both Butler and Lerner, most facilities will be open 24 hours a day.) Finally, preliminary plans for 1999-2000 call for the addition of another 43 workstations, the replacement of a further 89 workstations, and the addition of 10 public printers in the libraries. Once those changes occur, AcIS will operate over 560 public workstations and printers, 22 percent more than in July 1998 and nearly three times as many as in 1993-94.
Technical support has not kept up with the rapid deployment of equipment around campus. AcIS has aggressively automated support functions to reduce its need for personnel. Nonetheless, experience has shown that it still requires one technician for every 120-150 public workstations to maintain them properly. With only two professional technicians that ratio had climbed to 190-to-1 by the end of 1997-98, leading to extended downtimes (especially after hours and on weekends when staff was not available), delays in the deployment of new equipment and reliance upon managers and programmers to handle many lower-level service tasks, thereby diverting them from their primary responsibilities. Without additional technicians, the further expansion of public access equipment now underway will only aggravate these problems.
To support the growing inventory of public access equipment, AcIS has added, and already filled, two positions in its Academic Technologies Group, thereby bringing the current ratio of technicians to equipment down to 110-to-1, which will rise to 140-to-1 after the expansion described above. The additions have enabled AcIS to extend coverage from normal business hours until 8 p.m. during the week using currently budgeted student assistants, and to deploy a full-time technician on Sundays (as well as on Saturdays during critical periods such as finals). They will permit AcIS to maintain the current standard of a four-hour response for high-priority services when staff is on duty, without resorting to the expedient of diverting managers and programmers from other functions, even as the number of new workstations and printers available to the University community grows. They will free up time for technicians to cross-train on various types of equipment, thereby increasing their flexibility and allowing AcIS to respond more rapidly to service problems. They will allow programmers to concentrate on enhancing the services offered and on developing tracking and management systems that will help to improve the service operation. Finally, management and staff will be freed to perform more complete tracking and evaluation of the emerging technologies that AcIS will need to deploy in the future to maintain the University's academic information infrastructure.
The expanding use of electronic classrooms also requires additional support to protect against equipment failures that disrupt classes and to respond to faculty requests for help with a particular technology in a timely manner. AcIS currently maintains 15 electronic classrooms on the Morningside campus that are equipped with the latest multimedia equipment and four portable carts that can be moved among other classrooms that have been adapted to accommodate them. All of these classrooms are also connected to the campus network and Internet. In fall 1998, 28 departments used the electronic classrooms each week for 226 class sessions in 126 separate classes. As reliance on the electronic classrooms grows, so do the demands on AcIS to ensure that no class session is disrupted by equipment or network problems. AcIS will use its added technical support staff to help keep the existing classrooms functioning effectively and to reduce class disruptions to as close to zero as possible by increasing preventive testing and maintenance of equipment.
Supporting Instructional Use of Technology
If information technology is to be successfully adapted for teaching and learning at Columbia, faculty need to be encouraged to explore its potential and assisted in applying it for instructional purposes. At the most basic level, faculty who use the multimedia classrooms, even those who are "technology-literate," require orientation to the equipment and assistance in handling special needs and problems. To meet this need, AcIS has added a new position to provide more effective operational support for the classrooms. Further, as the number of faculty developing curriculum materials in digital form grows, the support structure needs to move beyond ad hoc arrangements to provide a wide range of services, including training in the use of equipment and software tools, help in developing specialized applications, and assistance in the creation or conversion of content for on-line delivery.
The potential of a more systematic approach to developing instructional applications was made clear over the past two summers in the work of the Faculty Cluster for Instructional Technologies, a cooperative endeavor that included science faculty interested in applying the technology to instruction, student assistants funded by the Provost, and AcIS. Following up on the success of those trials, AcIS and the Libraries, in cooperation with the Institute for Learning Technology, have joined in an initiative under the auspices of the Executive Vice Provost to establish the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. The Center opened in space made available by the renovation of Butler Library in March 1999. AcIS will participate fully in its development and operations, providing both technical expertise and staffing.
The Center's resources and services will be developed in consultation with faculty, both those who are already familiar with the uses of technology and those who are only now becoming interested in them. Several universities have had instructional technology programs in place for a number of years, and their experience will be reviewed for lessons applicable here. As a work in progress, the Center will adapt to changing needs. In general, however, the Center will directly assist faculty and conduct surveys, workshops, demonstrations and seminars to reach additional interested faculty throughout the year. In this way, the Center will facilitate the faculty's adoption of information technology for instructional purposes and make on-line curriculum development as cost-efficient as possible in its use of their time. It will also enhance the benefits that faculty and students derive from the investments the University has made in electronic classrooms, networks, web servers and other forms of information technology.
AcIS will also enhance the support it offers users by improving the level of service provided through the Computing Support Center and its Help Desk. The Computing Support Center has served both academic and administrative users since its unification with the AIS Help Desk in 1995. Through telephone and in-person consultations, it handles all questions and problems relating to the use of the network and central electronic services, provides initial diagnoses of problems with personal workstations and consults on microcomputer purchase and use. Unresolved problems are referred to appropriate support groups for solution, including groups within AIS as well as AcIS.
The user population served by the Support Center (and its predecessors) grew over 700 percent from 1991 to 1998. As technology became more sophisticated, so did the demands individual users have made upon its resources. Contacts rose sharply at annual rates of 25-30 percent in recent years, and the nature of user questions grew more complex and time-consuming to answer. To contend with this exploding workload, the Support Center had a staff of only four Help Desk technicians and five support technicians (including the manager) in the 1997-98 academic year to support well over 30,000 users, or only one staff member for every 4,000 users.
Due to this imbalance, the staff devoted virtually all of their time to direct user assistance, leaving them unable to engage in other activities that might moderate the demand for individual help, such as improving user documentation or creating answer databases for the Web. Even so, the Center could not properly respond to the volume of requests it received. During most of the 1997-98 year, the Help Desk averaged 886 calls per week, of which only 44 percent were answered immediately, and another 35 percent after the call was placed on hold or a message was left. The remaining 21 percent of the callers hung up without speaking to a consultant or leaving a message. From late August through early October, when the demands on the Help Desk were most intense, call volume doubled to 1,768 per week, of which only 17 percent were answered immediately. Another 53 percent received assistance after waiting on hold or leaving a message, while 30 percent abandoned their attempts to reach the Help Desk.
To remedy this situation and strengthen the Center's effectiveness, AcIS has added new staff, reorganized operations, extended service hours and expanded on-line documentation and user support. The Help Desk staff was expanded in summer 1998 with the addition of three full-time positions and two FTEs of part-time, student assistants. A newly created position is also being filled to assist the Support Center and other AcIS groups to improve their user documentation and publications. The additional positions permitted AcIS to add a second shift to the Help Desk in October 1998, extending its hours from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday through Thursday, rather than from only 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. In addition, Help Desk operations have been reorganized to provide quicker call pickup and better use of technical expertise. A front-line pool of operators, principally students, give short answers to informational and simple technical questions. More complex queries are referred to a second tier of expert, full-time staff. Depending on call volume and on the urgency of prevailing problems, callers are either immediately transferred to a specialist or issued a tracking ticket which will result in a call back within an appropriate period of time.
Since timely responses to problems are key to maintaining quality service, the Help Desk call-tracking system has been redesigned so that every request, no matter how simple, can be tracked from receipt to resolution. After the problem has been resolved, follow-up calls from the Support Center to a sample of callers will track satisfaction with the support provided. As experience with the new Help Desk design and data on user satisfaction accumulate, AcIS management will set specific targets for responding to different types of problems and establish standards for each stage of problem resolution -- time to diagnosis, time to hand-off to the responsible service provider, total time to resolution. Each service provider -- AcIS, AIS, SIS, OCS, et al. -- will, moreover, have access to tracking statistics and user satisfaction reviews to monitor its own performance.
While the joint AcIS-AIS Computing Support Center and Help Desk continue to work to fulfill the University's increasing requirements for computing and networking assistance, they have not had the capability necessary to address the faculty's need for more direct support at the desktop. To meet this need, Administrative Information Services (AIS) is now developing a plan for enhanced support to faculty for their desktop computer systems and connections. The Help Desk will remain the entry point for faculty seeking support for their desktop computing needs under this new program, providing triage, referral, tracking and follow-up.
Preliminary data indicate that the measures taken to improve the responsiveness of the Help Desk have started to pay off. With the additional personnel and reorganization of operations, 65 percent of calls to the Help Desk are now being answered immediately and another 20 percent after the user holds. The average time to answer a call, for those who stay on the line, is now under 30 seconds. The reorganization of the Help Desk and improved tracking have also reduced the time staff members spend on the telephone. This has allowed them to begin to improve other forms of help, such as in-person consultations at the Support Center or through e-mail assistance, to acquire training and to engage in development activities that will further enhance the services available to members of the University community. To assess the effectiveness of these measures in strengthening the Help Desk, the University will continue to monitor levels of user satisfaction through periodic surveys.
Substantial additional resources will be needed to implement the enhancements and strategies described in this document and thereby ensure that the University Libraries and AcIS continue to meet the informational needs of the Columbia community through fiscal year 2004. By the end of that period, the University will devote a total of $75.4 million in incremental funding towards those ends, including $17.5 million in addition to the base operating budgets of the Libraries and AcIS and $57.9 million in new commitments as part of the 2000-04 capital program to improve their facilities and operations.
The Libraries' operating budget will grow to $30.2 million, or $7.6 million over fiscal year 1998. In fiscal year 2004, AcIS will have a projected operating budget of $5.7 million, an increase of $3.0 million over fiscal year 1998. Graph 1 shows the projected operating budgets of the Libraries and AcIS for each of the years covered by the six-year plan. The purposes to which the additional funding will be devoted are described below and summarized in Table 1.
Capital commitments in the Libraries under the new 2000-04 capital plan will total $48.3 million. Additionally, the Business School will invest $2.2 million of its own capital funds in renovations to the Thomas J. Watson Business and Economics Library in Uris Hall. Another $7.4 million in capital improvements will be made in AcIS during that period. These capital sums will continue the significant investments that the University made in the Libraries and AcIS under the 1995-99 capital plan. Those totaled $66.5 million, of which $42.2 million were committed to the first two phases of the renovation of Butler Library, $2.0 million were used to reconstruct the Gabe M. Wiener Music and Arts Library, and $1.2 million were invested in improvements in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library. Table 2 provides a summary of the capital commitments that were made under the 1995-99 plan and the projects that will be funded as part of the 2000-04 plan. All told, over the decade ending in fiscal year 2004, the University will have invested at least $124.4 million in capital improvements in the Libraries and AcIS. (Click here to view Graph 1 and Tables 1 and 2 in .pdf format)
As described in earlier sections of this plan, the additions to the operating budgets of the University Libraries will be used for four primary purposes:
The Libraries have added eight FTEs to the staff responsible for shelving and the other activities necessary to maintain its collections in an orderly and accessible manner. Of these, 5.5 have been assigned to Butler Library, one to the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, one to the Lehman Social Sciences Library and 0.5 to the C.V. Starr East Asian Library. It has also created a new position to improve the deployment and maintenance of public access computing equipment and through a combination of new funding and reallocations within its existing budget, another to assist with the development of new digital resources. In total, these new positions will expand the Libraries' staff by 9.5 FTEs, a 3.2 percent increase above the fiscal year 1998 staff. Over the six years ending with fiscal year 2004, the Libraries will incur $2.4 million in additional salary expenses for these new staff. It will also commit $659,000 in additional operating funds to increasing the annual pool of funds available for merit increases for all of its staff.
To alleviate overcrowding in the stacks, most importantly, in Butler, during the three years it will take to construct a permanent off-site storage facility, the Libraries will spend $510,000 on an interim arrangement with a vendor that will reduce the volumes already on the shelves to a more manageable level and open up space for new acquisitions. The Libraries have also undertaken three one-time projects in fiscal year 1999 at a total cost of $55,000 to reorganize specific collections and thereby make them easier to use.
The increases in the AcIS operating budget have permitted it to create additional positions in critically needed areas and to improve the competitiveness of the salaries it offers. AcIS has added a total of 11 FTEs, an increase of 14.3 percent over fiscal 1998 levels, to its staff. Nine consist of new professional positions. The two others will be filled by students. These positions will be devoted to the following activities:
The cost of these additions over the six years covered by the plan will be $2.9 million. To improve its competitiveness for the talent its needs, AcIS increased the salaries of its staff by an average of 10.5 percent in fiscal year 1999. These adjustments will add $2 million to its salary expenses over the six years ending with fiscal year 2004. In addition, it will devote $464,000 to expanding its annual merit pool for its professional staff to 4.5 percent.
AcIS has also allocated $8.416 million in incremental operating funds to supporting various needs that previously had been met out of the capital budget. Through fiscal year 2004, it will spend $2.860 million to maintain the campus networks, establish new back-up links among the University's three campuses and with the Internet and participate in the Internet2 project which will allow the University to take advantage of new, more powerful networking technologies. A further $1.552 million will be devoted to enhancing off-campus access to the network through the modem pool, and $1.636 million will be invested in the central servers that provide faculty, students and staff with an expanding range of on-line services. Over the six years that end with fiscal year 2004, AcIS also plans to use $720,000 to fund the hardware and software needs of the digital library program and $1.271 million to upgrade the equipment it maintains in the Morningside computer labs and at various locations around the campus for public use. Finally, it will commit $227,000 to staff research and development and another $150,000 to making improvements in the space AcIS occupies in Philosophy Hall and Watson. In addition, to these expenditures which will be funded out of the AcIS budget, the Business School will pay AcIS for managing its separate modem pool.
The University's capital plan for fiscal years 2000 through 2004 contains substantial new financial commitments to the enhancement of the facilities and operations of the Libraries and AcIS. It includes funding for the two highest capital priorities of the Libraries: it provides $10.4 million for the construction of a permanent off-site storage facility in cooperation with Princeton University and the New York Public Library and $28 million for Phase III of the renovation of Butler Library. Other major capital commitments the Libraries will make will include:
Finally, the Libraries will undertake more modest renovation and refurbishment projects in the branch libraries totaling $1.3 million.
For AcIS, the key capital project over the six years covered by the plan will be the re-engineering of the Morningside campus network. By fiscal year 2002, AcIS will replace its current architecture at a total cost of $7.2 million, creating in its place a system that will meet the University's network needs for the following seven to ten years. Additionally, the new capital plan includes $200,000 to equip the computing labs and public kiosks in the Alfred J. Lerner Student Center.
Separate from the Libraries and AcIS capital budgets, the Graduate School of Business will invest $2.2 million to renovate the Thomas J. Watson Business and Economics Library. In addition, the University will make further capital investments to upgrade equipment in the electronic classrooms.
In sum, by the conclusion of the decade ending in fiscal year 2004, the University will have invested at least $141.9 million in new resources in the operations and facilities of the Libraries and AcIS, of which $17.5 million will represent additions to their operating budgets and $124.4 million will consist of capital expenditures. The operating budget of AcIS will grow more rapidly than that of the Libraries, while the Libraries will be the primary beneficiary of the capital investments. This reflects the differing nature of their needs. AcIS has added a larger number of new positions, must make a significant adjustment in its salary structure to remain competitive for high quality talent, and will henceforth fund enhancements in the University's central servers out of its operating budget rather than from its capital allocation. For the Libraries, the key improvements are capital in nature: an off-site storage facility to relieve overcrowding in its stacks and to accommodate future growth in its collections, and renovations to its facilities, most importantly Butler Library, to remedy the problems created by their aging physical conditions and to give them new capacities make possible by the new information technologies.
While the sources from which the enhancements in the Libraries and AcIS are funded may differ, their purposes are the same. Columbia's information services are unmatched by all but a few of the country's universities. In the years to come, however, those services will need to change. The new information technologies are dramatically altering the nature of learning, teaching, and scholarship, creating new information requirements and new means of meeting them. The Libraries and AcIS face the complex task of responding to these opportunities and challenges while maintaining their rich collection of printed materials and upgrading the library space, computer labs and other physical facilities on which their users continue to depend. The investments and the strategies outlined in this plan will meet their most critical needs through fiscal year 2004, thereby ensuring that they continue to fulfill their academic missions and Columbia continues to enjoy the information services it requires.