Library

New Vision, new Mission, new Needs

In the year 2000 the LTA Library experienced a significant shift in its structure, acquisition policy, number and provenience of readers, cataloguing policy, and number of employees.

Because of the new vision of the LTA being transformed into the Ukrainian Catholic University in the years to come the Library was developing its new mission and adjusting the Library activities to it. A new mission as it is stated below was a clear and challenging goal for our Library:

• to serve effectively a broad community of the Catholic University in its search for information in all areas of human and social sciences
• to remain the largest and broadest collection of religious materials in Ukraine
• to help academics from around Ukraine in pursuing their research.

This new vision of the Library and its implementation will inevitably lead to the growing demand in robust equipment and sophisticated technology. The Library, envisioning all of the changes and innovations, plans carefully its budget and its expansion rates in different areas.

Acquisitions

With materials on theology and religious studies still at the focal point of our acquisition policy the Library started to acquire books in other areas of humanities and social sciences more actively. It was clear that without a solid-based collection in these areas there will not be a chance to help our faculty and our future students for their new curricula and new academic projects. Thus, the new book acquisition program has been launched and successfully continued in the second half of the year 2000. For the first time our Library was able to acquire new Western books in different areas on the regular basis. This shift in our activities from theology to a broader area of research and study helped our librarians, contributing considerably to their skills in information retrieval and knowledge of Western publishers, libraries, and information centers. This, in turn, brought more effective help for our users.