Dean’s Message

K-State Libraries

Lori Goetsch, dean, KSU Libraries

A student-oriented mission

K-State Libraries take a strong role in maintaining and promoting an environment that advances knowledge. “We are interested in satisfied users,” Dean Lori Goetsch said. “The primary way to measure success is not just to meet, but to also anticipate student and faculty needs for library and information resources. We must know what’s happening in classrooms and emerging areas of research and collaboration among the faculty. From there, we build collections and services that help students and faculty excel in their academic disciplines.”

A library transformation began in 1996 with a $30 million addition to sections that were built in 1927, 1951 and 1970. While keeping some of the old, the new 153,000 square feet of space has increased student and faculty study/research space, modernized collections housing spaces, updated user services spaces and added administrative offices.
Thus, a new era is under way in the K-State Libraries. Goetsch became dean in 2004, having built a 20-year career at four major, public academic libraries, three of which are at land-grant universities. She has quickly developed a mission and objectives for the K-State library system.

“We’re in the 15th year of a 20-year space and facilities plan, and we already need to plan how we can repurpose space in Hale Library for upcoming generations of students, collections and research,” Goetsch said. “We’ll continue to provide collections for K-State’s academic disciplines and provide staff to make this a living, breathing facility with services for our users and collections for our students and faculty.”

Expanding borders

Leading and learning with our community

Part of the big picture for the library is partnering with the university’s academic disciplines to provide appropriate support through general collections and properly trained information staff. “I have a friend whose e-mail signature file says, ‘five minutes with a librarian saves you an hour on the Internet,’” Goetsch said. “That speaks to the need for people resources — information specialists — whom we rely on. There will be fewer people standing behind a desk and more librarians building collections, collaborating with faculty in research teams and teaching in physical and virtual venues.

“Sometimes the library is the forgotten backbone of the university. We wouldn’t ask anyone not to support their own college, but if you wanted, for example, to endow a faculty chair or support the College of Agriculture’s horticultural center in Olathe, remember to contribute to the library so we can provide materials to support the research that the center is conducting. When faculty chairs, graduate students and undergraduate students come in on scholarships or fellowships, we need to have the resources to support the work they do.”

One way to help ensure that the K-State Libraries has adequate print and electronic collections is through endowment gifts from alumni and friends of the library. “We will continue to see the electronic environment grow with more and more resources coming online,” Goetsch said. “There are many areas of research and teaching that will rely on print media, but we’ll also see the growth of multimedia collections, like audio and video. Electronic resources are not free nor are they inexpensive.”

Diversity and adaptability are other key issues of concern. “If the university continues to grow international programs and we have our students going out globally, as well as students from other countries coming here, we really must think about the impact on the library,” Goetsch said. “We need to look at the languages represented in our collections, services we can provide remotely to students and language capabilities of our staff to assist a diverse student body. Collections and services go hand in hand as a strong element in an exceptional research library — staff expertise to identify, organize and interpret collections for the library user is another.”

What makes us different

Special collections and university archives

As electronic information proliferates, academic libraries differentiate themselves through their special collections. For K-State, these research collections include milling and grain science, prairie ecology, military history and cookery.

The cookery collection, the preeminent special collection in the K-State Libraries, was built largely through generous K-State alumni and friends. Their substantial donations and bequests of books or personal libraries, along with judicious purchases, have produced a collection containing more than 15,000 cookbooks and related volumes. Works date from 1487 to the present, reflecting several languages and cultures. The collection holds many works considered rare or simply not available anywhere else worldwide. The core of the cookery collection was assembled by Dr. Abby Lillian Marlatt, who graduated from K-State in 1888. Another major donation was received from a 1921 grad, Clementine Paddleford, who Time magazine declared in 1953 as the “best known food editor in the United States.”

“Because of electronic media, we need to continue to capture the historical record of the campus,” Goetsch said. “A great example is a recent visit from former K-State President Duane Acker, who came here to work on his presidential papers. The library has all his appointment books from his presidential years, but today, appointments are often kept on electronic or digital devices. We’re really challenged on how to capture and deal with electronic records management.”