Cindy Skalski is now located in Green Library, East, Rm 252B. Brenda Bennett, who recently joined the procurement staff, is temporarily located in Green Library, East, Rm 245E. After June 17th, Brenda will be located in Green Library, East, Rm 252A.

Brenda's phone number is 3-9663, and email is brb7@sulmail. Cindy's contact information remains the same: phone 3-3221, fax 5-1548, and email cindy.skalski@forsythe.stanford.edu.

When the Miller Library at Hopkins Marine Station was built 11 years ago, expansion space was included but not completed. In January compact shelving was installed in the "annex" and last month the lighting, ventilation, and another doorway were installed. There are still some finishing touches to be done, but starting this month the library has started to shift parts of its collection into the compact shelving. It will be used to house the reprint file collection and older years of the journal collection. The compact shelving increases stack shelving space by a 60% which has been sorely needed for several years. Thanks to Don Intersimone and Karen Nagy for their help in getting this project completed.

The Stanford-California State Library Institute on 21st Century Librarianship and the Peninsula Library System present a teleconference on:

Distance Learning Services: More than Remote Possibilities on Friday, June 16, 2000 9:00 a.m.-10:30 a.m.

The live teleconference from the College of DuPage Dancing with Change library management teleconference series, will explore the issues and answers for all libraries facing the challenge of providing services to patrons and students at a distance with complex service needs.

The teleconference will feature:

John Berry, President-Elect of the American Library Association, Dr. Dan Kies, Professor of English, College of DuPage, Dawn A. Bussey, Director of Reference Services, Schaumburg Public Library, Illinois

We are currently working on a site in the library for interested staff. Please R.S.V.P. to ddpounds@sulmail.stanford.edu or 4-5413 by June 13 if you are interested in attending and you will be notified via email of the location.

I am delighted to share news recently received from Elizabeth F. "Penny" Jones, Executive Director of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. In her recent letter Ms. Jones writes that the 1999 University Products Award for "distinguished achievement in the conservation of cultural property" was awarded to Walter Henry at the AIC's 27th Annual Meeting in St. Louis.

Ms. Jones states that the award recognizes the accomplishments and contributions of conservation professionals who, through substantial efforts, have advanced the filed of conservation and furthered its cause through public outreach and advocacy. She notes that Walter Henry has clearly accomplished the furtherance of the field though his visionary introduction of the possibilities for conservation communication and education through the Internet. Ms. Jones goes on to say that Walter recognized the importance of the Internet as a tool for the conservator and its potential for outreach opportunities to educate the public long before most of us even knew of its existence. His work as Webmaster for Conservation OnLine (CoOL), and related conservation sites, including the AIC site, that are hosted by the Preservation Department of the Stanford University Libraries are of utmost importance to conservation. Everyone in the professional and the public who have used the sites values his tireless interest and efforts on behalf of conservation. She concludes by saying that the AIC also deeply appreciates the commitment of the Stanford University Libraries to conservation.

Congratulations, Walter!

For the past several months, SUL/AIR has been involved in an experiment to deliver Interlibrary Loan materials in digital form. The project, known as "Digital Delivery of Interlibrary Loan", or dd-ILL, recently went into production mode, and has already delivered seven monographs (and counting!) to ILL requesters. You can see sample results, in the form of searchable PDF files, by going to http://dlib.stanford.edu:6520/text/dd-ill/ and entering the keyword "sample1" or "sample2". (Be warned, though, that the download files are rather large and memory-intensive: depending on the speed of your computer and network connection, and the number of other applications you have running simultaneously, viewing these files can cause the machine to become sluggish -- or worse. Save all your work before viewing.)

ILL requests are selected for inclusion in the project based on several criteria: the works must be in the public domain (that is, published before 1925 or by government agencies), and, because of the requirements of the funding agency (see below), priority is given to requests from California patrons. So far ILL and dd-ILL staff have themselves selected which requests are appropriate for digital delivery; at present there is no special request form for this service. When feasible, we give potential dd-ILL patrons the option of receiving their materials digitally, instead of in the traditional way. Many of the items we are digitizing are ones that would not otherwise have been sent out for interlibrary loan. In these cases, digital delivery is clearly preferable to no delivery at all. But even in other cases, digital delivery has several advantages: in spite of slow downloads, the actual delivery is much faster even than overnight mail. And borrowers can now "own" a copy of the work they've requested.

The innovation of this project is in the combination of interlibrary services and digital collection development. We are attempting to strike a balance among fast and efficient digitization on demand, usability (e.g. searchability), and suitability of the resulting electronic files for our own permanent digital library. Some of these goals are, of course, somewhat at odds: how do we provide accurate, readable, searchable, portable, and durable digital resources within a standard ILL turnaround time of three to five days? Preliminary results are promising, and reports from users have so far been positive. But in addition to the natural paradoxes inherent in the project, technical hurdles continually keep dd-ILL staff on their toes. File size (i.e. download time) continues to be a problem, as does searchability for poor-quality originals such as microforms (for example, try keyword "sample3" to see a 1904 German publication, in Fraktur type, scanned from microfilm: it's not overwhelmingly pretty, and not searchable at all, but still quite readable). We are steadily whittling down turnaround time for dd-ILL requests, but the three-to-five-day goal now appears well within reach.

This work is largely the fruit of the tireless labor of Sharon Hom, a ten-year veteran of Interlibrary Services, who agreed to return to SUL/AIR part-time to work on the dd-ILL project. Sharon's knowledge and experience in traditional ILL, her contacts in the branches and departments of the Libraries, her creative thinking, and her willingness to learn and implement new (and sometimes very buggy) digitizing technologies have made it possible to move dd-ILL through planning and into production mode. Her timely appearance on the dd-ILL staff has been a godsend.

The dd-ILL project is a cooperation of Interlibrary Services and the Humanities Digital Information Service, and has benefited from the help of staff in Preservation and the Social Sciences Resource Center; it is overseen by a task force with members drawn from other diverse areas of SUL/AIR. The project was funded this year by a generous grant from the California State Library; we are in the process of applying for a continuation grant to expand the service through next year, and to increase its visibility both within SUL/AIR and in the larger interlibrary loan community.

SUL/AIR has the following new open position this week.

Computing Info Systems Analyst (6/05/00); REQ# J001580

For a complete description of this job and a list of all current SUL/AIR jobs, visit the Human Resources Web site at:

Human Resources Web site.