Action for Libraries

              ACTION FOR LIBRARIES
WHERE IS BCR GOING,
ANYWAY?
By David H. Brzmell,
BCR Executive Director
BCR is nearing the end of the lease for its Denver
office and training facilities, and the Board of
Trustees recently requested that the BCR manage­ment
team conduct an investigation of purchasing
and leasing options for new office space. They
also authorized the BCR Executive Committee to
enter into either a building purchase or another
lease based on a thorough cost analysis and
projections of return on investment.
A preliminary analysis seems to indicate that the
low rate of return on our investments and
increasing lease costs may make it advantageous
for us to consider purchasing a building to house
the BCR office and training facilities. We are still
involved in negotiations with our current landlord
to extend our lease, so we may well be able to
avoid the sturm und drang of an office relocation.
But, if we decide to move from our present
location, doing so without a disruption of services
to our membership will be our highest priority.
The BCR Board of Trustees has also begun a
year-long strategic planning exercise. The first
activity in this process will be a presentation on
state networking plans underway in the BCR
member states. This presentation will be made at
~e BCR Denver offices on September 17, from
DIne am to noon. BCR members are, of course,
most welcome to attend this presentation and
participate in the discussion of how state net­works
will impact BCR services over the next few
years. Since many of you will be in Denver for
the LlTA convention that week in September,
please plan to spend an extra few hours with us
examiuing these important issues. _
BC RETROSPECTIVE
CONVERSION SERVICES FOR
KANSAS AND MISSOURI
LIBRARIES
BCR has recently contracted with seven Kansas
and Mi~souri Ii.braries to ",rovide retrospective
conversion services for then shared automation
project.
The Kansas City Public Library Automation
Project includes Kansas libraries at Baker Univer­sity,
Baldwin City; Benedictine College, Atchi­son;
Haskell Indian Junior College Lawrence·
K:msas City K.ansas. Community CoIiege, Kans~
CIty; and Missouri libraries at Metropolitan
Community Colleges, Kansas City· Park College
Parkville; and Rockhurst College, Kansas City. '
The Kansas and Missouri libraries will create one
central bibliographic database that will include
the holdings of all seven participants. The core of
the new database is the 600,000 titles owned by
the Kansas City (Missouri) Public Library. Over
the next year, BCR's Cataloging Services will
convert approximately 285,000 titles to machine
readable form for these libraries. This conversion
will be funded by a grant from the Hall Family
Foundations to the libraries.
BCR; has pr.eviously provided retrospective con­verSIOn
serVices for a number of public academic
and special libraries of various siz~s and is
providing current cataloging for medical special
and academic libraries. Some recently c~mpleted
projects include work for the National Center for
Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo­rado,
the Colorado Water Resources Library
Mesa State, Front Range Community and Puebl~
Community Colleges in Colorado and Loras
College in Dubuque, Iowa. _ '
A NON-PROFIT, MULTI-STATE liBRARY SERVICES COOPERATIVE