The US Sports Academy Library’s on-line catalog features a football theme in honor of the start of another football season. See it for yourself at: http://bit.ly/1uKiNxY . The Academy Library online catalog supplies a wealth of information about student and faculty research at USSA and insight into sports research.
For example, the most searched key-word in the library catalog is the term football, with thirty separate keyword searches for football materials so far this season. Other popular keywords this month include ‘special Olympics’ with 9 searches, law (7), tennis (7), sports contracts (5), and coach leadership (4). Football is the second largest subject of the Academy library’s collection, with 369 titles. The most numerous subject in the library is the Olympics with 519 bibliographic records.
This football season, the catalog was searched 1032 times, including 35 searches from off campus using mobile devices. Keyword is the most used search method with 696 distinct keywords used by library patrons; subject and title searches represented second and third place (135 & 121searches respectively). Currently there are 1,480k student and 39 faculty patron records with access to the materials of the Academy library.
Few other Sport Libraries contain more in this fascinating interdisciplinary discipline. The online catalog indexes 8382 titles in sports and allied subjects held in the Academy’s library. Special Collections add another 2k items including USSA Dissertations, periodicals, sport art books, golf book collection, sport videos, and micro formats. The oldest book in the library is from 1896 entitled the Report of the first modern Olympiad in Greece. The average copyright date of the entire collection is 1994. As of September 1st, 217 items were in circulation, representing approximately 2% of the collection.
With such a concentration of sports materials the Academy library lends seven times more than it borrows from other libraries using OCLC WorldShare for interlibrary loans.
Of course, the digital collections represent the bulk of Academy library. These can now be searched from the library catalog using the SURFIT tab. Totaling 360,000 e-journals, 4,500 ebooks, numerous audio books and videos, these digital resources enhance the Academy Library’s service to the many distance learning students and faculty at USSA. For example, during the first month of football season starting August 2014, the electronic resources of the Academy library recorded 98k searches from students and faculty.
To conclude and predict next month’s statistics, Hockey will rise from the current, meager level of 4 keyword searches in the catalog to at least 10 at the beginning of the NHL season partly because hockey is the Academy librarian’s favorite sport.
Submitted by Rob Hudson, Librarian/Archivist, USSA