Northern Virginia Center

Service Objectives

The collection which is housed in the Northern Virginia Resource Center is intended to serve the immediate information needs of the students who are enrolled in the degree programs currently being offered by the NVGC. Applying whatever techniques are currently feasible in order to address the research requirements of the resident faculty is also important and, indeed, it is recognized that the research interests of the instructors and the research paper topics of their students are often closely related. Library service for visiting Blacksburg students and those enrolled in the programs offered by the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University centers is of peripheral interest, and no attempt is made to tailor the local collection supported by Virginia Tech to satisfy the needs of these groups.

Environment

The Resource Center operates in a demand-driven and relatively fluid environment. Change is both expected and continuous. Because the library's collection is small and addresses only a few selected fields of knowledge, every variation in the programs being offered has an impact upon what it ought to include. It should also be noted that the service provided by the Resource Center depends on having efficient access to the on-campus collection, and that it draws heavily from this resource on a daily basis.

Electronic Library

The librarians, faculty, and administrators monitor technological and fiscal developments constantly so that every feasible avenue can be used to provide the NVC community with many forms of electronic information. Online searching for end-users, a limited number of CD-ROM products, and access to databases which reside in networks will be supplied as quickly as possible. Subscriptions to indexes and other materials in hardcopy are being replaced with or supplemented by access to information in an electronic format.

Collections

As of summer, 2000 the Resource Center does not collect periodicals in print format. New monographs and reference works will be added to the Center's collection each year, and they will normally be kept for ten years. Only those items which are still actively circulating or which are identified by the librarians or faculty members as "classics" will be retained for longer than ten years. All withdrawn books will be returned to Newman Library.

Revised 8/2000