Like other Cal State Fullerton entities, and indeed the entire state of California, the Pollak Library is coping with large budget reductions and mandatory employee furloughs. Although the library has attempted to minimize the impact of these cuts on the quality of the library’s collections and services, inevitably these reductions in budget and staff time result in changes in the daily operations of the library. In an effort to keep the campus community apprised of those changes, University Librarian, Richard Pollard has written a letter (.pdf) detailing the changes and explaining the rationale behind them. The areas of the library currently impacted by the reductions include library open hours, reduced library licensing and purchases of books, journals, and databases, changes to the number of interlibrary loan requests that can be active at one time, and a reduction in services on official campus furlough days.  Read the memo (.pdf) for details of these policy changes.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

One of the cost saving measures the Library has adopted this year is to stop the interlibrary ordering of books that we own but are currently checked out to someone else at CSUF. We are now asking library users to “recall” any checked-out book they wish to use. This is done within the Library Catalog by clicking on the “Recall this item” button. The student, faculty, or staff member with the checked-out book will get an email notice giving that person 10 days to return the book to the library.

If you happen to get such a notice, remember your kindergarten teacher and how he or she taught you to share and be nice. :-)  It is way better than getting a time-out (or an overdue fine)! For more information about this policy, please see the Recall Policy.