Creating sustainable library collections in a digital world
Since their inception, libraries have been repositories of knowledge, community centers, and integral to a democratic society. Academic library collections are the cornerstone of inquiry and research, providing the campus with the fundamental tools to learn and extend existing knowledge.
The University Libraries’ collections serve as the center of knowledge for the campus, supporting all aspects of teaching, learning and research.
Our library collections continue to grow; we have over 1.1 million ebooks, and nearly the same number of physical items. We have enhanced our digital collections, balancing growing needs for research and information with measures to ensure fiscal sustainability. We license over 700 databases and 26,000 journals, providing immediate access to full-text resources used across the campus.
Beyond our locally held materials, we participate in numerous borrowing networks, including the Michigan eLibrary, which extends our patrons’ access to research and information beyond our library. This year, our patrons borrowed nearly 5,000 items. Equally important is our reciprocal sharing with other libraries, which we provided nearly 12,000 times in 2022-2023.
Supporting open access and research at Western
The Libraries’ continued focus is towards open access and working to provide universal access to information—by adopting freely available open access materials or by sharing campus research and scholarship in openly available means.
Our Open Educational Resources Adoption and Creation Grant program is estimated to have saved Western students $1.3 million in textbook costs since the program started in 2019. The adoption grants encourage Western instructors to select high-quality open educational resources that are free for students instead of high-cost traditional textbooks. Our creation grants support faculty in creating new materials for use at WMU and by learners globally, developing a portfolio of material designed to meet campus needs. We have several titles in creation now and expect to see the first offerings during the 2024-2025 academic year.
As a research institution, the Libraries works to promote the scholarly efforts of the campus and share research and creative scholarship with the larger academic community. In 2023, we adopted three new “transformative agreements” to support open access publishing without additional cost to WMU. These new publishing models, developed in partnership with both publishers and statewide consortiums, make our research open to all, promote the careers of researchers, and allow for greater dissemination of scholarship. Over 20 authors have taken advantage of this program and saved the University over $60,000 in article publication charges.
Our efforts to share the work of our researchers can also be seen in our institutional repository, ScholarWorks. This online repository holds over 82,000 campus works and over 17 million downloads, extending our global reach. New additions include hundreds of theses and dissertations, specialist projects, and many thousands of items that reflect the campus history, such as historical newspapers. In fiscal year 2022-2023, we added 15,525 new items to the collection, representing one of the larger growth areas for library collections.
Another form of library publishing, our digital collections, also saw tremendous growth with new collections being shared. We’ve seen an expansion of our popular WMU Regional History Photograph Collection and added new digital collections, including the Kalamazoo Transient Bureau Case Files Collection.
We have also expanded efforts to make our locally created collections more accessible and share our content with the Digital Public Library of America and JSTOR, ensuring our materials are discoverable to international audiences.