seamans.p65 324 College & Research Libraries July 2002 324 Virginia Tech’s Innovative College Librarian Program Nancy H. Seamans and Paul Metz Nancy H. Seamans is Director of Instruction at the University Libraries of Virginia Tech; e-mail: nseamans@vt.edu. Paul Metz is the Libraries’ Director of Collection Management and College-Based Services; e-mail: pmetz@vt.edu. In 1994, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) Libraries founded a College Librarian Program. Begun with four librar- ians serving four colleges, it has since grown to include eleven librar- ians providing comprehensive library services to the six of Virginia Tech’s eight colleges not served by branch libraries. Other authors have de- scribed the early history of the program or outlined some of its specific elements.1 By reviewing how the program came to be, by analyzing the choice points it presents, especially from an administrative perspective, and by discussing its benefits and costs from a university point of view, the authors hope to illuminate an exciting and potentially beneficial ap- proach that other large institutions might seek to adapt to their own mis- sions. he Virginia Tech Libraries sup- port a public university of ap- proximately 26,000 students and 2,000 faculty members. As a land-grant institution, the university has a significant outreach mission. The Uni- versity Libraries at Virginia Tech are largely centralized, consisting of one main library building and three significantly smaller branch libraries. Two of the branch libraries serve two colleges, the College of Architecture and Urban Studies and the College of Veterinary Medicine. The centralized structure of the Vir- ginia Tech Libraries has benefited the li- braries by making it possible to run a large operation with limited staff and has ben- efited users by making it easy to work in interdisciplinary fields. However, the costs of centralization have always in- cluded a physical and psychological re- moteness of the library from the daily life of most faculty and serious students. The College Librarian Program was founded in large measure to overcome this dis- tance and to more closely integrate the libraries and the use of library resources into daily academic work. In addition to this goal, which might have been stated in any decade, several realities of the early 1990s were particu- larly auspicious for launching the pro- gram. These included: • the long-awaited opportunity to access enough of the libraries’ resources from remote locations to make it realistic to expect that, with sufficient support, users could do productive literature-de- pendent work from their offices; • a strong push from the university administration for collaboration among units; Virginia Tech’s Innovative College Librarian Program 325 • an urgent sense that point-of-need assistance would be required by users still struggling to make personal computing part of their daily work. The College Librarian Program was founded with the strong support of Earving Blythe, vice president for infor- mation systems, to whom the libraries re- ported at the time. Conversations in early 1994 between Blythe and Joanne Eustis, interim director of the university librar- ies, revealed a shared desire to improve the libraries’ status on campus through some kind of imaginative program that would connect the library to the colleges. Originally conceived as a team approach that would address both the information and the technology needs of faculty and students, the program’s original sponsors were personnel from the university librar- ies, Virginia Tech’s Educational Technolo- gies Department, and its Communica- tions Network Services unit.2 The College Librarian Program was designed to include functions of the Com- puting Center that were taxed far beyond its capabilities by the questions of first-time computer users struggling to cope in an era predating today’s standardization and accompanying ease of use. The hope that librarians could provide decentralized technical support and so reduce the con- sulting burden of the Computing Center was a major factor in the program’s initia- tion. The university’s goals to incorporate computing in classroom teaching and other means of instructional delivery made it especially urgent that increased support be made available. The program was officially announced in October 1994. In an article in the cam- pus newspaper, Dana Sally of the univer- sity libraries’ Reference Department indi- cated that “in response to academic re- structuring mandates… information pro- fessionals [would be placed] in closer prox- imity to the largest group of information users on campus: the faculty, staff and stu- dents of the university’s colleges.”3 Although the library had long as- signed departments to individual librar- ians and asked the departments to ap- point faculty liaisons to the library, the previous model was library-centric. The new program was designed to become user- and college-centric by taking the services out of the library and placing them into the colleges. The original four college librarians were drawn from the ranks of the Refer- ence Department. As the program was designed, the librarians were placed in offices within their colleges with the un- derstanding that 75 percent of their time would be dedicated to serving their col- legiate clientele. With no new funds available, the program was developed completely through reallocation of exist- ing resources. It also was made clear to all from both the colleges and the librar- ies that there was to be no investment in distributed print collections or new branch libraries. Instead, any new collec- tions dollars were to be focused on elec- tronic resources that would be available to all. Certainly the expanding availability of electronic resources was a driving factor as the program was developed. But an- other factor was Virginia Tech’s commit- ment to creating a wired campus in a wired community. At the same time that the program was developing, Blacksburg was positioning itself for international recognition as one of the first “electronic villages,” with Internet access being readily available not only on campus, but also throughout the community. College librarians were intended to complement the new, but confusing, rich- ness of digital resources by putting a per- sonal face on the impersonal and increas- ingly huge body of information that was available electronically. An early phrase associated with the program was that it would combine the salutary effects of “high tech and high touch.” The costs of centralization have always included a physical and psychological remoteness of the library from the daily life of most faculty and serious students. 326 College & Research Libraries July 2002 The 1994–1995 annual report for the new program indicated not only that the building of interpersonal ties was a criti- cal goal, but also that it was being at- tained. In the report, the college librarians emphasized growth in both the quantity and the quality of their interactions with the teaching faculty. One librarian re- ported that being in the college had “en- hanced my relations with students and faculty, allowing me to understand more fully their mission and culture.” All wrote of getting to know their faculty members better, of attending faculty meetings and being named to committees in their col- leges, and of having a better understand- ing of their faculty members’ and gradu- ate students’ research needs. They all mentioned supporting faculty members needing assistance with computers, com- puter resources, and connectivity. More- over, they reported the creation of sub- ject-specific World Wide Web resource pages and talked about assisting with everything from e-mail to course devel- opment. During the year, all had pre- sented both classes and informal sessions on library resources and the best uses of technology.4 In the 1995–1996 academic year, two additional college librarians were added to the program at the request of colleges not yet served by the program. In addition, because of the large constituency served by the single college librarian for the Col- lege of Arts and Sciences, a second posi- tion was added. This distribution of re- sources, together with the existing branch libraries, ensured that each of the eight colleges was receiving the benefits of one or more assigned librarians. The empha- sis during this year appears to have begun to shift away from technology support and to focus on support for curriculum devel- opment and instruction. However, the col- lege librarians were still taking leadership roles in the technology arena, with two of them participating in the development of Web sites for their colleges. The program has continued to grow in recent years. Excluding the two branch librarians, there are now eleven college librarians (four for the College of Arts and Sciences alone). The college librarians are justifiably proud of their unique role at the university, where their primary re- sponsibility is not to the library but, rather, to the college they serve. They have cre- ated virtual collections via a wide variety of departmental Web pages and have pro- vided a mechanism for taking the library to its communities with minimal expense to the library. Moreover, the college librarians have assumed responsibility for the majority of the instruction offered by the university libraries. Partly in recognition of this in- creasing instructional role, and as the re- sult of a librarywide reorganization, the college librarians were designated as the core members of a new Instruction Depart- ment created in 1999. With this reorgani- zation, the college librarians now report jointly to the authors who are the director of instruction and the director of collection management and college-based services. The Multiple Roles of the College Librarian The critical issue to be resolved in estab- lishing any program for satellite librar- ians is to decide which of the many func- tions that a librarian might pursue should be filled by the incumbents. As the au- thors reflect on the history of the program at Virginia Tech, the centrality of this question becomes increasingly apparent. Ideally, if the college librarian is to be presented as someone who can handle al- most all of a department’s library needs and can correctly refer the exceptional cases, each college librarian will play ev- ery role the public associates with library service. But as roles are added, not only is a potentially unrealistic standard for versatility and breadth of talent and knowledge among the college librarians set, but training burdens and complicated relations with specialized areas within the library are added. Ultimately, one also starts to require that either supervisors themselves be polymaths, capable of pro- viding policy direction in all areas, or the number of supervisors be multiplied. Virginia Tech’s Innovative College Librarian Program 327 The potential roles a college librarian might play include those of: • reference librarian; • instructor in library and informa- tion literacy skills; • builder of library collections; • Web master for relevant library re- sources; • colleague in the life of the college; • provider of technical support (PC/ Mac and software guru). Considering each of these roles in turn is probably the best way to tease out both the benefits and the difficulties that arise from a College Librarian Program. Reference Librarian Although library turnstile and circulation counts are holding more or less steady and Web page hits are growing madly, reference desk interactions are down in nearly all academic libraries.5 If this is because library users have become more sophisticated in defining research ques- tions, identifying appropriate resources, and evaluating the information they ob- tain, this trend might be celebrated. But the considerable evidence of user naiveté about the Internet is one of the key argu- ments for a program that gives students and other users access to the services for- merly sought at the reference desk. As Virginia Tech’s program has taken hold and as more college librarians have started to spend much of their time in the college offices, the contact between them and their clientele has become quite ex- tensive. College librarians are often asked by their clientele to help with literature reviews, to check citations, to provide facts, to make referrals, or to provide other forms of reference service. It would be inaccurate to label all contacts between the college librarians and their clientele as reference transactions. Indeed, the blur- ring of the various professional and so- cial kinds of interactions between college librarians and their clientele that makes it impossible to categorize each contact precisely is a sign of health. But in a typi- cal year, the college librarians now will have more than 1,000 interactions they would categorize as largely of a reference nature, meet or consult with more than 1,500 individuals or groups, and reply to thousands of e-mails. Instructor The same technological forces that have led to a drop-off in reference desk activ- ity—the movement of library resources to Web-based accessibility and the emer- gence of competing information resources of a wide range of quality and credibil- ity—make it imperative that academic li- braries redouble their instructional ef- forts. The goal at Virginia Tech is to equip students to use library resources effi- ciently, but to do so as a part of a much larger program devoted to instilling life- long skills in information literacy. Al- though our reach has often exceeded our grasp, we strive first to give each new stu- dent the basics, chiefly through first-year English and Communication Studies classes, and then to identify the appro- priate upper-level courses in which to partner with faculty in imparting disci- pline-specific information skills. Virginia Tech’s librarian for first-year and outreach programs coordinates its freshman program instructional efforts. These efforts do not generally require much involvement on the part of the col- lege librarians, although some of them teach class sessions during peak times. (Several college librarians are serving on a team that is involved in developing a comprehensive program for first-year students, and more will be involved in building on this program to develop a cumulating library instructional pro- gram for the university.) However, the more specialized task of teaching busi- ness students how to use Dow-Jones or the Wharton Research Data Service or of acquainting engineering students with Compendex, INSPEC, and online stan- dards relies heavily on the college librar- ians. It is easier to sell this approach when the librarian is a familiar coresident of the academic buildings. 328 College & Research Libraries July 2002 The librarians are working with the academic departments to identify appro- priate courses that most students will take early in the major and to establish part- nerships between the college librarians and the instructors. It is easier to sell this approach when the librarian is a familiar coresident of the academic buildings. When a student who has had a librarian’s class passes the librarian in the hall the next day or sees him or her in an office in the college, there is an obvious opportu- nity to reinforce the lesson or to extend it to meet a specialized information need. Bibliographer Most of the library information and ma- terials budget is in fund lines controlled by the branch librarians or the college li- brarians, who shoulder the full range of collection development responsibilities. Each has a “firm order” budget line for books and other one-time acquisitions in each disciplinary fund she or he controls, and each is responsible for dialogue with faculty and other users about resources, including those being examined on trial. Under a relatively short-lived reorgani- zation in the mid-1990s, collection devel- opment was vested in a separate depart- ment. This scheme was abandoned, chiefly because college librarians re- ported that the surrender of collection development responsibilities had re- duced their credibility and interaction with their teaching faculty. Web Master Although the breadth of the college librar- ians’ duties makes them generalists in a functional sense, they build considerable specialized subject competence through their focus on the needs of specialized cli- entele. The Web page for the university libraries at Virginia Tech includes “sub- ject resource pages,” which link not only to the relevant library resources for the discipline, but also to pedagogic re- sources, professional associations, and related Virginia Tech and discipline sites. Each college or branch librarian maintains the subject pages for his or her discipline. The libraries offer technical assistance to those college librarians who want help with their Web pages, but all the college librarians are exclusively responsible for content. Colleague The role of faculty colleague—of a junior variety in most, but not all, contexts—has come as a largely unanticipated by-prod- uct of the college librarians’ presence as collaborators and neighbors with the teaching faculty. It is not uncommon now for college librarians to attend the regu- lar meetings of department heads with their academic deans, to travel with other faculty to workshops or national meet- ings, or to serve on faculty search com- mittees. A few have participated as coinvestigators on grants, especially for projects that include an element of collec- tion building. Technician It is paradoxical that although the notion that librarians could serve as mobile com- puter and software support staff was very much on the minds of the information systems administrators who initially pro- posed the program, technical support is the only potential role not formally played by Virginia Tech’s college librarians (who are nonetheless happy to help a faculty member install a program or identify a virus). For several months after the idea first surfaced, the libraries successfully re- sisted the concept on the grounds that li- brarians were not well trained on hard- ware and software support and that few true library resources were yet available for remote use. But by the time the Col- lege Librarian Program was imple- mented, the university had launched its award-winning Faculty Development In- stitute giving all faculty new computers and training on their use. Computing had also become easier and self-made experts had emerged in every department. It was therefore possible to omit any formal ex- pectation that librarians would provide significant technical support. Virginia Tech’s Innovative College Librarian Program 329 Various Approaches and Emphases among the College Librarians One of the blessings, but also one of the challenges, of the college librarian role is that each incumbent must define it in his or her own way. College librarians bring to their task a considerable range of ap- proaches, the variety of which seems to be about equally an outcome of their in- dividual skills, abilities, and interests and the dissimilar needs and cultures of their clientele. The college librarian for agriculture and the college librarian for business spend most of their time in their colleges. Apart from her extensive campus con- tacts, the college librarian for agriculture travels throughout the state to work with extension agents and visits the Commonwealth’s experiment stations. The needs of her far-flung constituents also have made her a forceful and in- formed advocate for improved document delivery mechanisms within the library. The college librarian for business empha- sizes on-site assistance and training with the highly specialized corporate and fi- nancial databases important to her con- stituency, although she continues to pro- vide general reference desk assistance and holds office hours in her library office as well as her college office. At the other pole from them in terms of where they can be found at any time are the two college librarians for engineering, who have not found it productive to spend time in their college. Both have given up their college offices, partly because their departments are widely scattered, but mainly because the culture of engineers encourages reliance on e-mail and phone and on just-in-time, point-of-need deliv- ery of information. (Virginia Tech engi- neers do not just drop in to chat!) Respond- ing to these realities, the college engineer- ing faculty concentrate on collection de- velopment, on building highly informative and efficient Web pages, on providing in- struction for engineering students, and on extensive one-on-one consulting from their offices adjacent to the T call numbers in the main library. Most of the other college librarians fall somewhere in between these poles in terms of where they spend their time and the roles they emphasize. Behind the Lines: Structures and Resources Required to Support the Program Having elected to empower the college librarians with virtually all the roles that could be vested in their positions, the Vir- ginia Tech University Libraries also have maximized the supervisory burden, the complexity, and the need for support from behind the front lines required for pro- grammatic success. These challenges have been by no means insuperable, but they have required careful planning and con- tinuous follow-up. As previously indicated, the college li- brarians co-report to the director of in- struction and the director of collection management and college-based services, who communicate with one another con- tinuously to coordinate priorities and workloads. These supervisors must keep a close eye on the relationship of the col- lege librarians to the overall library man- agement of the functions they serve. These relationships are again best consid- ered in terms of the college librarians’ roles. Reference The duties of the reference role posed no particular challenge to Virginia Tech’s first college librarians, who were transfers from the Reference Department and were very familiar with the entire range of reference services and resources. As these librarians have been replaced with new hires, most of whom have been new to the university as well as to the program, new college li- brarians have been required to go through the training program offered to all refer- ence staff and to work the main reference desk at least four hours weekly through- out their first year at Virgina Tech. Sev- eral have chosen to work the desk beyond that, either continuously or for an occa- sional semester, so as to maintain their skills and knowledge. 330 College & Research Libraries July 2002 The college librarians who work the reference desk are on e-mail lists through which they receive updates on new re- sources or policies. Coordination also is sought through monthly joint meetings of all staff in the Reference, Instruction, and Collection Management departments. Instruction The most recent reorganization of the librar- ies, in 1999, established the Instruction De- partment. The college librarians play a cen- tral role in planning and coordinating all aspects of the instructional program other than those for first-year students. During the first year of the Instruction Department, the college librarians were instrumental in developing evaluation tools that were used to evaluate approximately 80 percent of the instruction sessions offered by university libraries personnel. In 2001–2002, they took a lead role in the redesign of the depart- mental Web site and in 2002–2003 will col- laborate with faculty on the use of Web- based Information Skills Modules that are being developed by a team led by the col- lege librarian for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Although information literacy was a component of the early years of the Col- lege Librarian Program, in the past two years it has become a key component of the Instruction Department’s mission. Part of the mission statement, approved in 1999 by all members of the department, states: “We will collaborate with members of the University Community in developing in- structional programs that will help them to identify, locate, and evaluate informa- tion, and will support them in their life- long learning and teaching endeavors.”6 A significant amount of instruction was taking place prior to the creation of the department, but instruction session and student numbers have shown a dramatic and steady increase in the two years since the department was created. During the 1998–1999 academic year, the year before the department was established, 391 ses- sions were presented to 7,147 students. In 2000–2001, the number increased to 585 sessions with 11,215 students contacted. Collection Management Collection development has had the same department head for many years, as a re- sult of which policy goals, budgetary structures, and detailed procedures were in place and widely understood before the program was launched. All of the origi- nal college librarians already had collec- tion development responsibilities when they took on their new duties, although assignments had to be adjusted to reflect the new division of labor according to college lines. (Earlier, some otherwise- logical combinations such as education, psychology, and human development, at one time spread across three colleges, had defined individuals’ assignments.) Because among them the college librar- ians carry the majority of the materials budget, their efforts are central to the li- braries’ success in this domain. But in their collection development role, they are treated simply as bibliographers and at- tend monthly meetings with the depart- ment head, the branch librarians, and the handful of individuals responsible for selection in such specialized areas as mili- tary science, law, and medicine. Major projects such as serials cancellations or minor ones such as the updating of poli- cies or advising the department head about the approval plan are assigned equally to all bibliographers. Groups of bibliographers assemble at least twice a year to consider new serials subscrip- tions. Web Mastery Overall responsibility for the libraries’ Web presence resides with a librarian Web master within the Reference Department. He is guided by a steering committee on which college librarians are well repre- sented. The committee has provided loose guidelines that allow college librarians and others to construct subject pages that The more the college librarians take to their role, the less visible their accomplishments sometimes are from the library. Virginia Tech’s Innovative College Librarian Program 331 have a consistent format and “look” but allow great flexibility for discipline-spe- cific kinds of information. Challenges Posed by a College Librarian Program The College Librarian Program at Virginia Tech has been a remarkable success and can serve as a model for transferability to other institutions. Nonetheless, there are potential disadvantages, the omission of which would leave an unbalanced pic- ture. These include: • the inconvenience of maintaining and equipping two offices, even if both are shared with others; • the continuous need for coordina- tion between supervisors and functions; • interpersonal tensions resulting from the perception that college librarians are unusually free to set their own sched- ules, are unaccountable outside their de- partment even though their work affects other units, or are advantaged by being in unusually visible positions; • the potential for conflicting loyal- ties, with the attendant risk that college librarians may make the central adminis- tration look bad; • difficulty in accounting for the time of college librarians or measuring their accomplishments in valid and reliable ways; • the need to hire people who are self-starters and can work independently balanced against the need to provide some way of accounting for the use of time by the college librarians. Among the remedies for these risks, the most effective are awareness, effort, and continuous dialogue. Evaluation is not an easy task when the professionals being evaluated have great freedom and are encouraged to take ini- tiative. The authors have specifically ad- dressed the difficulty of accounting and evaluation by devising a standardized, Web-based means for reporting all out- reach activities of more than fifteen min- utes’ duration. These are categorized by type (class, tour, presentation, or other). The time invested, the place, the affiliation and level of the clientele, and the number of people contacted are all recorded. The authors also have found that the more the college librarians take to their role, the less visible their accomplishments sometimes are from the library. Therefore, in the near future the authors will ask the academic deans to solicit and organize faculty per- ceptions and comments to be used as an important element in the annual evalua- tion of the college librarians. Benefits of a College Librarian Program In the early 1990s, Virginia Tech had a few advantages that helped make it possible to establish a College Librarian Program. These included faculty status for librar- ians, a centralized library structure, a his- tory of matching librarians to academic units and of decentralized collection de- velopment, and a strong technological infrastructure. Although these advan- tages may explain Virginia Tech’s early start, none of them is so fundamental to the program that it might not work equally well in other settings. So, given the challenges described in the previous section, should all large academic libraries disburse a majority of their pub- lic services staff across their campuses? Although the authors can only definitively answer for Virginia Tech, they would en- thusiastically affirm that the benefits to their users, as well as to the libraries, have greatly outweighed the costs and suggest that there is a strong case to be made for transferability to other campuses. A mini- mal listing of the advantages includes: • Distributed public services encoun- ter users where they spend their time, making help available where and when it is needed, whereas traditional services wait for users in a location they do not often care to visit. • Librarians who split their time be- tween the library and the constituents’ sites acquire a much more detailed and grounded understanding of campus needs. • Distributed public services facili- tate a shift away from distributed physi- 332 College & Research Libraries July 2002 cal collections, making it possible for li- braries to abandon inefficient branch lo- cations. • Physical propinquity facilitates for- mal and informal partnerships with fac- ulty, leading not only to more comprehen- sive and relevant team-teaching of infor- mation literacy concepts and skills, but also to a transformation of librarians’ par- ticipation in campus culture and gover- nance. Readers may have observed that other bases, such as the distribution of depart- ments across campus buildings, might be substituted for college lines as the basis for the division of labor among distributed or college librarians. Such a means of mak- ing assignments would have a surface logic in several ways, including a more finely graded distribution of resources. (In- deed, the authors have sometimes felt that one or another college might need an ad- ditional half of a college librarian and felt some frustration that college librarians come in irreducible human quanta!) It would be the authors’ advice to resist this temptation and to insist on colleges as the unit of distribution because only this approach ensures the backing of the aca- demic deans. Although there has been variation among Virginia Tech’s deans in the resources they either could or did give the program, even the less enthusiastic deans have supported the program fully. The authors view the College Librar- ian Program as an exemplar of the kinds of barrier-disregarding, technology-lever- aging, connection-making aggressive in- novation that will characterize the top-tier institutions in the coming decades of change and transformation in higher edu- cation. To evaluate the program from the libraries’ point of view would miss the point: surely the libraries’ clientele must be granted that podium. The authors be- lieve that the strongest evidence of the success of Virginia Tech’s College Librar- ian Program has come from the deans. They have given office space, meeting time, and direct financial support for travel. They have spoken in favor of the program in both administrative and shared governance settings. Perhaps most tellingly, each has made certain that his or her college gets and keeps its fair share from the program. Notes 1. Jane E. Schillie, Virginia E. Young, and Susan A. Ariew, “Outreach through the College Librarian Program at Virginia Tech,” Reference Librarian 71 (2000): 71–78; Ladd Brown, Molly Brennan-Cox, and Nancy H. Seamans, “College Librarians: Partners in Acquisitions and Serials Management (Liaison Program at Virginia Tech),” Against the Grain 12 (Nov. 2000): 28–30; John K. Stemmer and John W. Tombarge, “Building a Virtual Branch. CLIO Program: Collegiate Librar- ian and Information Officer Placed in Various Colleges at Virginia Tech,” College & Research Li- braries News 58 (Apr. 1997): 244–48; Linda Maddux, “The CLIO Experience: Collegiate Librarian/ Information Officer for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Virginia Tech,” Virginia Li- brarian 41 (July/Aug./Sept. 1995): 14–15; Joanne Eustis, Linda Maddux, and Dana M. Sally, “Adapt- ing Information Services to New Realities: The College Librarian/Information Officer Program at Virginia Tech. Placing Librarians in Individual Colleges of Virginia Tech to Provide Custom- ized On-site Services,” Virginia Librarian 41 (July/Aug./Sept. 1995): 13–16; Richard Raspa and Dane Ward, The Collaborative Imperative: Librarians and Faculty Working Together in the Information Universe (Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2000). 2. Telephone interview with Joanne Eustis, October 5, 2001. 3. Dana Sally, October 6, 1994, Virginia Tech Spectrum. 4. Annual Report, College Librarian Program, Virginia Tech University Libraries, 1995. 5. Scott Carlson, “The Deserted Library: As Students Work Online, Reading Rooms Empty Out—Leading Some Campuses to Add Starbucks,” Chronicle of Higher Education XLVIII (Nov. 16, 2001): A35–A38. 6. Mission Statement, Instruction Department, Virginia Tech University Libraries, 1999.