Librarians at Iowa State University have worked diligently through the years to build, maintain, and provide access to collections in a variety of formats, supporting university instruction, research, and outreach. Points of pride associated with library collections include:

• Subject collection strengths: From its beginnings, the Library has collected extensively in the areas of agriculture and the life and physical sciences. After World War II the Library made a great effort to acquire long runs of scientific journals either through purchase or through a vigorous international exchange program. In addition to its traditional land-grant emphases, the Library has sought to comprehensively support research and teaching in the areas of engineering, information sciences, and the social sciences as they apply to rural America. Thus agricultural engineering, agricultural economics, and rural sociology are representative of strong academic programs at ISU supported by the Library. The University's recent emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches to both learning and research is reflected in the complexities of Library's collections, a result of highly coordinated work of the subject librarians.

• Electronic access to full-text journals: Since 1998, with strong support from the Faculty Senate, the Library has aggressively worked to accomplish a transition from print journals to electronic access to its serials holdings. By the middle of 2005, the Library provided access to over 58,000 electronic journal titles. This represented an increase of over 35,000 more titles available to ISU users than in March 2003. This shift in focus for journal format has brought journal articles to the labs, desktops, and homes of the Iowa State University community. In FY2005, the library ranked number four in the Association of Research Libraries in proportion of materials dollars spent on electronic serials.

• Special collections & archives: The Library Special Collections department maintains a unique collection of materials relating to the Archives of Women in Science and Engineering. These Archives contains manuscripts collections and oral history interviews documenting the lives and careers of hundreds of women scientists. The Special Collections department also manages large manuscript collections relating to agriculture in the United States. The rare book collection is particularly strong in the natural history, especially botany and ornithology. The University Archives contains numerous files on the history of Iowa State University and has organized over one million photographs of the institution. Currently, work is underway to convert selections from the university photographs collection to digital form, increasing their free availability to researchers any time, anywhere.

• Cataloging accomplishments and efficiencies: The work of staff in the Cataloging Department and a tradition of efficient cataloging processes have allowed us to fully convert our card catalog to electronic form, and essentially to maintain no cataloging backlog. The Library continues to find additional avenues to pursue cost effectiveness in this area. We receive cataloging records with our approval books and for our Federal Depository materials, eliminating the need to directly catalog each piece. Planning is currently underway to allow us to receive cataloging records for all orders placed with Yankee Book Peddler.

• Digital access to ISU dissertations: In 2005, the library began the process of converting all ISU doctoral dissertations from printed to electronic format through ProQuest. When the project concludes in spring 2006, members of the ISU community will have full-text, electronic access to over 10,000 ISU dissertations. Looking to the future, library staff are collaborating with the Graduate College Thesis Office to facilitate an anticipated shift to digital deposit of theses and dissertations by spring semester 2007.

Library staff also take pride in their collaboration and leadership roles in a wide variety of state, national, and international initiatives in knowledge management and resource sharing. These include:

• SILO (State of Iowa Libraries Online): The State of Iowa Libraries Online (SILO) Program was established in 1995 through an HEA Title II-B grant from the U.S. Department of Education. SILO is a joint program of the State Library of Iowa and the Iowa State University Library that provides resource sharing, telecommunication, and web development services to Iowa libraries. SILO staff maintain a statewide union catalog that includes holdings from 699 libraries and a web-based interlibrary loan application that is used by 712 libraries of all types.

• AgNIC (Agriculture Network Information Center): The concept of a comprehensive, web-based, agricultural information center was originally formulated by Iowa State University and the National Agricultural Library (NAL) in 1994, and led to the creation of AgNIC, the Agriculture Network Information Center, in 1995. AgNIC has grown to be a voluntary alliance and partnership of nearly 50 member institutions and organizations working to offer quick and reliable access to quality agricultural information and sources.

• USAIN National Preservation Program for Agricultural Literature (NPPAL): This NEH-funded program seeks to preserve and provide access to agricultural literature published or produced in the U.S. prior to 1950, through a series of systematically organized and coordinated projects combined with local initiatives. ISU Library staff began participating in Phase II of the NPPAL program in 1998, identifying primary resources dealing with Iowa agriculture and arranging for their preservation microfilming. A bibliography entitled "Iowa agriculture and rural life: a bibliography of materials published between 1836 and 1945" was published in 1994.

• LOCKSS ("Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe"): The Iowa State University Library is one of more than 80 institutions from around the globe participating in a project to develop open source software that will provide librarians with an easy and inexpensive way to collect, store, preserve, and provide access to their own, local copy of authorized electronic content they purchase. LOCKSS converts a personal computer into a digital preservation appliance, creating low-cost, persistent, accessible copies of e-journal content as it is published, creating online collections with the staying power of traditional hardcopy books and journals

• "Scholars Portal" project: The Scholars Portal Project was launched in May 2002 as a multiyear collaboration between seven members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and Fretwell-Downing, Inc. The project seeks to provide software tools to ensure an academic community can have a single point of access on the Web to find high-quality information resources and, to the greatest extent possible, to deliver the information and related services directly to the user's desktop. The ISU Library's local implementation of Fretwell-Downing's ZPortal federated search engine is known as Multi-search, and allows users to search over 100 online collections simultaneously.

• Beta partner in software development: The Library has participated in the beta testing of SirsiDynix (formerly Dynix and epixtech) products, which has allowed Iowa State to have a strong voice in the development of their library management system (LMS) software. Iowa State also developed High Availability cluster hardware configuration for the LMS and Library web site that became the standard the vendor recommends to academic libraries. This partnership has benefited the library, the vendor, and the academic community world-wide who use this vendor's products.

• Program for University Librarians in the Sciences (PULS): The Program for University Librarians in the Sciences (PULS), supported by a 2003 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), is designed to recruit and educate librarians to support the future information needs of university library users in the sciences. Census data demonstrates that nearly 58 percent of professional librarians will reach the age of 65 between 2005 and 2019, resulting in a likely shortage of well-qualified university librarians. The PULS program, a collaborative effort of libraries at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, helps address this shortfall by providing significant funding to a select group of students with degrees in science, technology, and health science areas.

• Ask-a-Librarian: The ISU Library began offering Ask-a-Librarian services in 1997 as an email-based service, allowing researchers to ask questions any time of the day or night and receive a response from a librarian within 48 hours. In 2003, the service was expanded to include a synchronous, web-based chat service, allowing researchers to engage in "live" online chat with a librarian. In 2004, the library partnered with other libraries in the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) to provide a more distributed and cooperative chat-reference service, thereby expanding the total number of hours the service is available at ISU (currently 57 hours per week).

• Biological Engineering Gateway: Staff at the ISU Library have collaborated in the creation and maintenance of the Biological Engineering Gateway, a collection of information resources recommended by librarians in the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) and intended for researchers, instructors, and students in the area of biological engineering. This resource is part of the GWLA Bioengineering Cooperative Resources Project.

• The Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO): The ISU Library joined the Library of Congress's national-level Program for Cooperative Cataloging in February 2000 by becoming a participant in the Name Authority Cooperative (NACO) Program. This requires the annual contribution of a certain number of original authority records to the national OCLC database. Iowa State University is the only NACO participant in Iowa.

• Kids Count! awards: Staff in the Library's Special Collections department regularly provide programming in support of National History Day. In recognition of their efforts, they have received the State Historical Society of Iowa's Kids Count! Award (2004), as well as the Kids Count! Certificate of Appreciation (2001).

• RAPID resource sharing: In 2003, the ISU Library became a member of RAPID, an expedited and fully-automated interlibrary loan (ILL) and document delivery service developed by Colorado State University, which dramatically reduces both the costs and the time requirements for interlibrary exchange of journal articles and other "non-returnables." RAPID software automatically verifies a lending library's specific journal holdings and minimizes the amount of staff mediation required in an ILL transaction. As a result, requested items can typically be delivered to the user's desktop in 1-2 days.

• Iowa Heritage Digital Collections (IHDC): The ISU Library has participated in the planning and development of the Iowa Heritage Digital Collections (IHDC), an online collection of Iowa history and culture as captured in digital documents, images, maps, finding aids, interpretive and educational materials, and other media from collections held by a wide range of organizations throughout the state.

• Iowa Conservation and Preservation Consortium (ICPC): The ISU Library is an active participant in the Iowa Conservation and Preservation Consortium (ICPC), an organization seeking to initiate, encourage, and enhance preservation and conservation activities by providing basic preservation education and training throughout the state of Iowa.

• Lennox Preservation Internship: With a generous gift from the Lennox Foundation, the Lennox Endowment for Preservation Education, Training and Outreach was established in 2005 to fund graduate level internships in library and archives preservation administration and conservation, and to support the educational outreach activities of the Iowa State University preservation staff. Each summer an eight-week internship will be offered by the ISU Library Preservation Department to provide graduate students with practical experience and exposure to preservation in an academic library environment.

• Information Assurance Awareness: In 2001, with funding from an ISU Miller Fellowship, faculty from the University Library, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Academic Information Technologies collaborated in proposing and developing a modular, web-based Information Assurance Awareness Delivery System. The resulting web-based tutorials on such topics as viruses, firewalls, hacking, and privacy, can be used in both instruction and outreach to promote IT literacy, and to heighten awareness of computer and network security issues.