Investment Opportunities
Dean's Fund for Excellence
Endowment
Facilities
Information Technology
Special Collections
Giving to the Dean’s Fund for Excellence allows you to provide us with the power to acquire books, collections and other important documents that might otherwise be out of our reach. When the University Libraries budgets for the upcoming year, it is impossible to know what research resources may become available. Since we are the only Associated Research Library (ARL) in the state, it is vital that we have the most current selection available to the students, researchers and the community at large. Your gift will give us the strength we need to keep pace with our contemporaries and make available the necessary resources for the University Libraries to provide the information to our community and beyond.
Contributions towards an endowment from private donors and/or corporation help to maintain a lasting income with favorable annual returns. Your gift of $10,000.00 or more entitles you to support specific collections and interests within the University Libraries. The principal gift or original amount is never spent. A portion of the earnings goes toward the educational purpose designated by the donor while the remaining income is added to the principal to ensure perpetual growth. Over time the endowment increases in value, which in turn allows larger yearly awards. These endowments forever honor the name of the donor or the person he or she has specified.
Learning is, and will continue to be, a social process that
benefits from group interaction and the guidance of librarians and technologists.
After all, libraries are not warehouses; they are settings for education,
discovery, interaction, and reflection.
The University of New Mexico University Libraries consists of four branches, a
center, and one annex storage facility on the main campus. The four branches are
the Centennial Science and Engineering Library, the Fine Arts Library, the Parish
Memorial Library (business and economics), and the Zimmerman Library (humanities,
social sciences and education). The Center for Southwes Research houses our special
collections. Following are examples of our vision for improving and creating new
physical and virtual spaces within the existing Library structures.
The Research Plaza is an essential part of 21st century libraries. With multiple locations throughout the four UL branches, it will provide facilities for wireless and wired networking, classrooms, conference rooms, presentation rooms, collaborative workstations and quiet study spaces. Comfortable student learning alternatives with faculty development spaces will be included. The creation of this new kind of library space will respond to the needs of the Millennium Generation, the generation currently graduating from high school and entering college. They have changing expectations for service, interactivity and group activities. The Research Plaza will provide clusters of individual and group study spaces that will integrate the latest online information resources with the rich collections of traditional materials.
The Research Plaza will serve as a new kind of library, where students can find books, conduct research on the Web, hear related music or lectures, find tutoring assistance and prepare information for class. It will also function as a virtual library, providing electronic access to collections for the distant user as well as those working on campus.
As we have learned from other academic libraries, this project will facilitate student recruitment and retention, will provide a welcoming and accommodating environment for minority and nontraditional students and will encourage collaborative learning. Further, the collaborative environment and technological resources will give the students the tools and experiences they need to meet the expectations of today’s employers.
The Centennial Science & Engineering Library serves as the
information hub for: five departments in the School of Engineering, psychology,
biological, environmental, and earth & planetary sciences, physics & astronomy,
mathematics, chemistry, and a number of UNM and New Mexico research institutes.
The Centennial Library has close relationships with three federal research
laboratories and their libraries and plays an important role in the technological,
economic and industrial development of the city and the state. CSEL is the
state's only official Patents & Trademarks library and houses the Map & Geographic
Information Center and the Minority Engineering Resource Center. Many thousands
of future engineers, scientists, information technologists, and science teachers
congregate and become lifelong learners here.
The Centennial Library envisions creating two new environments that provide a place
for meeting and exchanging ideas. The first is a collaborative learning space that
allows for the formation of temporary communities in an area of the Library that
is conducive to discussion, noise tolerant, close to current scientific journal
information, accessible to reference assistance, and provides cyber-café services.
Major components of modern teaching methods are cooperative problem solving and
group work based on expected workplace dynamics and the utilization of information
technology. This plan involves redeveloping the east portion of the Library's main
floor to maximize collaborative learning spaces, the best source of indirect sunlight
(this is an underground building), access to the electronic classroom, and to the
reference and research assistance desk.
The second is a pleasant reading area that protects the jewels of the Library's
collection and allows patrons to peruse them in comfort. Libraries have become
highly technological, and many patrons long for a place surrounded by books and
away from the clacking of computer keys. Such a reading room would provide a secure
area for science and technology materials that are at increased risk of theft or
vandalism and for the display of collections of scientific models and specimens.
Existing facilities are not environmentally suitable for long-term preservation
or security.
The Parish Memorial Library, servicing the Anderson School of Management and Economics Department, sees a growing need for adding an electronic classroom to its physical space. This is advantageous for several reasons. Hands-on training is quantifiably better for teaching our students information literacy and business research skills over our current demonstration-only facility. An additional classroom within the University Libraries system, especially in such close proximity to Zimmerman Library, would help alleviate some of the current (and growing) scheduling concerns for the existing electronic classrooms. Further, such a classroom facility could be marketed to the business community as a local online training facility, such as for small business market research.
The Alice Clark Room within Zimmerman Library is a one-of-a-kind room on campus, equipped to provide important resources for library patrons with special needs. However, the equipment in the Alice Clark Room is aging and needs to be updated with the most state-of-the-art technological accommodations available. The various disabilities that the Alice Clark Room seeks to serve are visual loss or impairment, learning disabilities, mobility, and hearing loss or impairment. It is one of the few locations in New Mexico where text to speech synthesis is provided not only for the students of UNM, but for members of the community as well. It is also one of the few locations in New Mexico where a Braille printer can be used to convert text into Braille. All of the services and technological devices in the Alice Clark Room can be utilized free of charge by Library patrons who have a genuine need. Additionally, the Alice Clark Room, and its contents, frequently function as teaching tools for a number of University classes in a variety of subject matters. Library Science, Special Education, and even Architecture classes have visited the Alice Clark Room to gain insight into the needs of library patrons with disabilities.
The impact of technology on libraries is said by some to be
as dramatic as the introduction of the printing press on the publication
and distribution of information and creative works of its time. Although
libraries of today continue to collect print books and journals, many academic
libraries now spend up to one third of their materials budgets on digital
or electronic books and journals. The UNM University Libraries currently
spends approximately 25% of the total materials budget on electronic collections.
These electronic collections and new virtual library services are delivered
to computers of library customers through the University Libraries website.
The library patron can be in the library, at home, in their office across
campus, across town, or doing research and traveling anywhere in the world
24 hours a day - seven days a week - and gain access to comprehensive digital
library collections and services.
The business of universities and libraries has become reliant on computers and
sophisticated software to conduct basic transactions. Students register for classes
and pay tuition online, receive class textbooks and readings in electronic formats
and communicate with their instructors, fellow students and families via email.
Gone are the days of card catalogs where individual 3"x 5" cards are filed in large
wooden cabinets. All library collections are now described in "online catalogs".
UNM's LIBROS catalog contains electronic records describing the more than 2 million
books, journals, reports, and other materials that are found on the shelves of
the four libraries comprising the University Libraries. The library subscribes
to more than sixteen thousand e-journals and owns more than sixty-eight thousand
e-books. A dynamic website, designed and maintained by library employees, recorded
more than 2 million hits.
The software programs necessary to purchase, catalog and provide access to collections
are state-of-the-art and require fast processors, large quantities of memory and
robust network connections. The Library has a very small technology budget that
has been outpaced by demand. In recent years, grant and gift funding have been
used to purchase computers for public or patron use. We need to also provide computers
for employee use so they may better process the 600,000 books and journals that
are circulated annually. The majority of computers on employee desks are unable
to handle the sophisticated programs now needed to efficiently purchase and catalog
materials.
Libraries will increasingly acquire and provide access to collections in electronic
formats. Although the University Libraries provides 180 computers for public use
in four locations, long lines of students waiting for time on the computers is
not unusual. Presently, most of these library desktop computers are located near
reference desks, far removed from the individual and group study areas scattered
throughout the libraries. Many large academic libraries have been addressing the
increased demand for computers by providing laptops for loan to students within
libraries. These laptops have the latest software programs and network cards for
access to the Internet. They are portable and can be taken to quiet study areas
or near the book and journal collections. Funds to purchase additional computers
for student use are vital.
The UNM University Libraries supports users at all levels,
from entering freshmen requesting general introductions to subjects to scholars
working on highly advanced research topics. In order to meet these widely
diverse needs, the University Libraries requires materials in nearly all
subjects and formats, including books, journals, serials, manuscripts, and
electronic resources, as well as specialized equipment to access the materials,
such as microform readers/printers and computers.
The UNM University Libraries' major special collections are Iberian & Latin American
collections and Southwestern studies. We also support a major science and technology
collection that serves an enormous research community on campus and in the state.
While there are other areas of special interest, these are our primary strengths.
To continue to grow these special collections, it is necessary to purchase current
books, journals and electronic resources; rare and out-of-print materials; and
archival collections. Historically, most of the archival manuscript collections
were donated to the University Libraries but current trends show that more literary
authors and photographers are requesting that we purchase their collections. Further,
when the authors are deceased and their collections have been sold to dealers,
we have no choice but to purchase the items we need.
Because the UNM University Libraries is continually growing its collections to
meet the needs of its students and faculty, space to store our collections has
become a pressing issue. The combined total of books, periodicals, government information,
manuscripts, donated materials and archives that are added annually to the UNMGL
represent 7,848 linear feet or 1.5 miles of shelving. Our shelving facilities already
meet or exceed their designed capacities. Fortunately, a solution is possible by
using compact shelving, which can virtually double traditional shelving space.
Once funds are secured to purchase compact shelving, it can be installed in several
locations in the various branch libraries and immediately alleviate the imminent
risk of running out space, without having to expand the physical structure of the
University Libraries.