Library Gets a Facelift - Redux

As we reported on an earlier blog the library was scheduled to be remodeled this summer.  Well,  guess what?  We did!  And we look marvelous.  We have new furniture, new carpet, new paint, new computers (including Macs), new seating areas, and an updated café. 

We are hearing great compliments from many folks that enter our space.

Projects like this don’t just happen over night.  In fact this one took about 9 months.

• December 2012 – We interviewed three different vendors to see which one would work best with our needs.

• January, February, and March,  - We looked at fabric pagers and furniture. We did know that we wanted to go with the TCTC color palette of red, black, and khaki. Facutly, staff, and students give input into our decisions.

• April - the library staff began the process of the move by shifting some of the shelving so that the large back window area became more open.  The bound periodicals were moved to another location so that a Legal area could be created to support the new paralegal program.

• May and June – The furniture began disappearing from the Library.  Painting started.

• July - Carpet and other construction.

• August – New furniture and a new circulation desk arrived.
• September - See those orange cones in the below picture?  Those will be replaced by new lights.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Impact on Students

Fall 2013 at Tri-County has begun with a newly remodeled library, new lecturer positions, and a renewed mission.  In addition to these, let’s adopt a customer service attitude towards the new students who have never been away from home. We need to show patience with the students who returned after a bad semester, have no idea what they are here for, and trusts us to unlock the door to their future. Empathy for the adult learners, who realize that they need an education to become better providers, yet are overwhelmed by the unknown. Most of us are here because we’d like to impart something or to be a part of something that’s far greater than all of us. There is no amount of money that will compensate for the overwhelming pride one feels when they’ve done their best and it was good enough. Your smile, warm words or tough love have changed someone’s life for the better.  A renewal has taken place, and we all have a reason to return for another semester.

Back to School!

Those words will either thrill you or make you cringe. When I was a student, for the most part I cringed at the thought of my summer ending and being “forced” to learn things that I could not foresee using in my future. Around the time I went to college. My attitude toward “Back to School!” began to change, as I was beginning to see the advantages of learning about things I might just use at some point.  I saw that I was nearing the end of my education, and I began preparing to get a job in my profession.

“Back to School!” has a very different connotation for a student’s first semester at college. The transition between high school and college (for traditional students) or between work and college (for adult students) can be jarring due to differences in expectations, responsibilities, and schedules. Tri-County Tech is working on making that transition the best it can be for all students regardless of their previous situation by creating a new department. Soon, all aspects of entering Tri-County Tech will be handled by the “College Transition” Department. This will include the dual-enrollment of high school students who are taking college classes for high school graduation requirements, recruiting students from high schools to attend TCTC as freshmen, the Bridge to Clemson program, and working with local industry to develop programs that produce graduates with skills needed for business. This new department will also cover the transition period when a student first arrives, as it will house the Comprehensive Studies Department and College Skills classes, both of which give students the ability to succeed here.

Other colleges, big and small, have seen the importance of the transition period and have departments like this. Here at TCTC, many individuals were working to accomplish these things independently. We will transition from the old way of doing things, where many departments were helping their students acclimate to college, to the new way, a standardized procedure that will surely help many more students persist in their college experience and eventually succeed.

Providing Library Services to Distance Learning Students

As colleges adopt a mode of classroom delivery that is dependent on distance learning (DL) courses, academic libraries are beginning to implement services to these students that rely on an Embedded Librarian program. At Tri-County Technical College, we have worked to partner with the English department to embed library services into the entry-level DL courses that concurrently require library workshops for the students enrolled in on-campus English courses.

We want students in the DL courses to obtain skills for conducting academic research. While the students that attend our on-campus workshops obtain solid instruction on the research process through a face-to-face workshop, we felt that the students in the DL courses were missing this key element of the overall English curriculum for the entry-level courses. As a result, students in the DL English courses were advancing through their academic careers with no clear guidance on what a true academic source for research is. Additionally, they had no knowledge on the methods available for obtaining academic sources from the library’s databases. By embedding library services into the entry-level DL courses, we were able to provide more direct support and instruction to this segment of the academic population.

The provision of these services contained some challenges and many successes. They are outlined below:

• The students enrolled in the DL courses must take the initiative to participate and experience success. We offered events, such as live chat sessions for research assistance, that the students often neglected to take advantage of. While there was a level of frustration related to this lack of participation, we felt that it was important to reach out to the students and offer the service. Their willingness to take advantage of it was entirely up to them, but as a college, we were working to provide an alternative connection between the English DL students and the library department through these live chat sessions.
• The provision of DL websites that provided library resources specifically for the research projects required of the students was beneficial and utilized by the students. For each course that we were embedded in, we designed a project-specific webpage that contained links to sources directly related to the requirements of the course’s research project. These step-by-step web guides assisted the DL students, as they progressed through the requirements of their research project. The current Tri-County Technical College DL pages are: http://library.tctc.edu/DLENG101, http://library.tctc.edu/DLENG102, and http://library.tctc.edu/ENG156
• As embedded librarians, we sent weekly emails to the students. These emails were designed to highlight the databases that would most benefit the students, based on the DL courses they were involved in. Additionally, they provided an opportunity for a direct connection to exist between the librarians and the DL students enrolled in the English courses. If the students had further questions, they could easily reply to the librarian to get additional information about the library, academic sources, and the research process.

The embedded librarian program has been underway for a year. Continuous evaluation of the program is a must, as we progress forward. Collaboration, between the library department and the instructors in the English department, is equally essential in obtaining success with this method for reaching out to the students enrolled in a variety of the entry-level DL English courses.

Library Cataloging

A library catalog is a register of all bibliographic items found in a library or group of libraries, such as a network of libraries at several locations. A bibliographic item can be any information entity (e.g., books, computer files, graphics, realia, cartographic materials, etc.) that is considered library material (e.g., a single novel in an anthology), or a group of library materials (e.g., a trilogy), or linked from the catalog (e.g., a webpage) as far as it is relevant to the catalog and to the users (patrons) of the library.

The card catalog was a familiar sight to library users for generations, but it has been effectively replaced by the online public access catalog (OPAC). Some still refer to the online catalog as a "card catalog". Some libraries with OPAC access still have card catalogs on site, but these are now strictly a secondary resource and are seldom updated. Many of the libraries that have retained their physical card catalog post a sign advising the last year that the card catalog was updated. Some libraries have eliminated their card catalog in favor of the OPAC for the purpose of saving space for other use, such as additional shelving.

Charles Ammi Cutter made the first explicit statement regarding the objectives of a bibliographic system in his Rules for a Printed Dictionary Catalog in 1876. According to Cutter, those objectives were

1. To enable a person to find a book of which either (Identifying objective)

• the author 
• the title 
• the subject 
• the category 

Is known

2. To show what the library has (Collocating objective)

• by a given author 
• on a given subject 
• in a given kind of literature 

3. To assist in the choice of a book (Evaluating objective)

• as to its edition (bibliographically) 
• as to its character (literary or topical) 

These objectives can still be recognized in more modern definitions formulated throughout the 20th century. 1960/61 Cutter's objectives were revised by Lubetzky and the Conference on Cataloging Principles (CCP) in Paris. The latest attempt to describe a library catalog's goals and functions was made in 1998 with Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) which defines four user tasks: find, identify, select, and obtain.

A catalog also serves as an inventory or bookkeeping of what's in the library. If an item (a book) is not found in the catalog, the user doesn't have to search the shelves but can continue her search at another library.
For our Library Guides please click this link for more Cataloging: Mel Chandler,
Guides

Library Book Collections
by Mel Chandler - Last Updated Dec 3, 2012
A listing of the TCTC Library Book Collections