The Task Force on Research Infrastructure recently released its preliminary report (http://www1.umn.edu/systemwide/strategic_positioning/tf_prelim_reports_0603/res_infra_prelim.pdf). Wendy Lougee is a member of this task force, and I think it is worth noting that the Libraries' collections are mentioned several times in this report as a priority service and resource for the University.
I also wanted to alert you that the task force made use in the report of Institutional-level citation metrics from the Thomson-ISI Essential Science Indicators (ESI) product, which the Libraries recently licensed. Especially since this is a fairly new library resource, you may receive questions about ESI from faculty or others who read the report.
The task force needed a method to assess the relative strength of research in various subject areas at the University. The method using ESI to achieve this is described in some detail in the Task Force report (Appendix A, p 21-3), and so I refer you to that document for details. For sake of clarity, though, I'll mention that the percentage rankings shown in the Task Force report were calculated including only ranked universities, not other types of institutions such as corporations and government agencies which show in ESI rankings. That is, we (Marc Jenkins, the task force co-Chair, and I) hand-selected the universities from the institutional rankings shown in ESI, and retabulated the rankings for this subset of institutions. Hence, reproducing these rankings would not be a straightforward task for someone trying to answer a question at a reference desk.
Any attempt at ranking subject areas or departments is inherently controversial, and while we've taken considerable effort to handle the ESI data in a fair manner, some questions/concern about this can be expected from interested faculty members. If a faculty member approaches you concerning the use of the ESI data in the Task Force report, please feel free to refer them to Wendy or myself (messn006@umn.edu).