CSU Libraries
CSU Libraries is committed to providing a sustainable research and learning environment that depends less and less on paper. Through steadily expanding electronic services and resources, the library has been able to drastically reduce photocopy and printing services, saving more than $30,000 each year and eliminating tons of paper waste.
CSU Libraries is committed to sustainable research, saving more than $30,000 each year.
Sustainable electronic library services include the following:
- With Electronic Reserve, faculty and instructors post course materials for students to view online and reduce the number of paper handouts.
- Interlibrary Loan provides free, electronic access to any journal article in the CSU collection to CSU faculty, staff, and students. This reduces the number of photocopies needed and enables faculty, staff, and students to gain access to library materials without having to travel to campus.
- Scanners in the Electronic Information Center allow researchers to scan materials instead of photocopying.
- Journals are 73% electronic. After the devastating flood which destroyed a significant portion of the bound journal collection, CSU Libraries vastly expanded its electronic collection to include more than 24,000 electronic journals and 198 research databases and tools, again creating an environment for paper-free access anywhere.
CSU Libraries is also the inventor of RapidILL, a revolutionary article delivery service serving more than 90 research libraries in the United States and Asia. CSU’s Libraries interlibrary loan staff developed this service in response to campus document delivery needs following the 1997 flood. RapidILL provides fast, cost-effective, paper-free document delivery from library collections, delivering articles to user desktops in two days or less (the fastest request filled at Morgan Library was reported as four minutes) and reducing traditional inter-library loan costs by 70 percent. The program involves the delivery of items that are not digitized or available in any form on the Web. Traditionally these items would have to be photocopied and mailed. RapidILL made this process paper-free.
More than half of the participants of RapidILL represent the largest research libraries in the nation belonging to the Association of Research Libraries. Participants include Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, Purdue University, New York University, University of Hong Kong and National Taiwan University. More on CSU's "green library." http://lib.colostate.edu/about/news/greenlibrary.html