Emmanuel d'Alzon Library Newsletter Fall 2000

Improving Circulation

We welcome Nancy Bassett, our new Circulation Coordinator, to the d'Alzon Library. Nancy joined the staff in August just as reserve materials were starting to pile up on the shelves for the new semester! She has had to assimilate an enormous amount of new information in a relatively short period of time, including interviewing and scheduling 40 work study students, but she has proven equal to the task.

Nancy comes to Assumption from the Wachusett Regional School District where she was employed in the library at the Central Tree Middle School. She holds a certificate in broadcasting from the Connecticut School of Broadcasting and is currently pursuing an associate's Degree in Library Science and Information Technology from the University of Maine at Augusta. She brings to her new position many library skills as well as a melodious voice! If you have any questions about the Circulation or Reserve Departments Nancy will be happy to assist you and can be reached via email: nbassett@assumption.edu or by phone at 767-7271.

Debuts at d'Alzon

NetLibrary, the world’s premier provider of electronic books (eBooks), is now available via the d'Alzon Library web page. Through a cooperative agreement arranged for New England libraries by NELINET, we now have access to an eBook collection of almost 7400 titles.

The term eBook applies to published materials, such as reference books, scholarly monographs, and consumer books that have been converted into digital format for electronic distribution. NetLibrary eBooks are available to registered borrowers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week-- from any location in the world.

Using NetLibrary's easy-to-use information and retrieval system for accessing the full text of books, patrons can set up their own accounts for "borrowing" items from the collection. Currently patrons will have four hours to use a copyrighted NetLibrary title, but titles within the public domain may be borrowed for any length of time. Patrons can check out as many titles as they need at any one time. However, NetLibrary operates like a traditional library. If a patron has already checked out a book, that book will not be available to be borrowed until the four-hour loan period is up.

At this time, Assumption patrons have access to almost 7400 eBooks, including more than 3400 copyrighted books and almost 4000 public domain titles. To check it out, click on the NetLibrary icon on our homepage:

http://www.assumption.edu/dept/Library/

More information will be forthcoming! If you have questions, please call 767-7273.

From the Director's Desk

Dawn Thistle, Director of Library Services

LIBRARY CONCERNS

Over the past several months I have been pleased to be a part of the Steering Committee that has been working on Assumption's self-study report, preparing for our reaccreditation visit this spring. It has been instructive to look at the reports from 1991 and 1996 that relate to library services and to see how things have changed or stayed the same. It has also been interesting to see the draft reports prepared by members of the Committee that relate to other areas of the College and its programs. However, I must confess to some frustration--a feeling that the Library is not integrated into the academic programs of the College to the extent that it could be, despite some text in the self-study (as well as the NEASC Standards for Accreditation) that seem to point in our direction. For example:

The College’s draft self-study report (Standard 1) states that "the curriculum helps students to develop … the ability to read, to write, to speak, to think, and to collect and manage data so important to the modern world."[1] Furthermore, Standard Four defines an educated person “as one who has absorbed the tradition of the liberal arts…; who has developed independent critical thinking, skills of written and oral expression, capacities for continuing learning, habits of responsible action based on personal values and a sense of dedication to community; who has acquired specialized professional preparation for a meaningful career; who has gained knowledge not only of the Western tradition but also of cultures beyond one’s own…[etc.]”[2] [All italics are mine.]

Under "College-wide Academic Competencies," the study speaks of the writing emphasis at Assumption: “Most programs of the College strongly emphasize the development of writing skills, and courses require written work in the form of reports, essays, and research projects.” Continuing on under the heading “Capability for Continuing Learning,” the study describes capstone courses and senior seminars that “expect as a prerequisite that the students show evidence of the capacity for self-directed inquiry. At this point in their academic careers students should initiate the process of inquiry and research and demonstrate that on their own they have learned to raise questions and know how to go about pursuing answers.” [3] In other words, Assumption graduates should be new scholars, people who have progressed from being mere collectors of information (the products of other people’s knowledge) to ones who can now—by pursuing and finding answers—create new knowledge.

Where do the Emmanuel d’Alzon Library and its services fit into these descriptions and definitions? I believe that the ability to create knowledge (scholarship) should be another hallmark of the educated Assumption student. In almost every field our graduates will be expected to find and use information to create something new—whether it is using marketing data to create a grocery store display, using technical engineering reports to design a new widget, using census figures to write a grant proposal, or using historical information to develop a sixth-grade curriculum. This is more than information literacy, the ability to find and evaluate information. It is the ability they will need to synthesize and USE information to improve their businesses, their teaching, their practices, their lives.

Although librarians expect that research in some disciplines will depend more heavily on library resources than others, it seems logical—based on the above statements—that most students would need to do some significant amount of library- or resource-based research before they graduate. However, only a small number of faculty work with librarians to ensure that their students receive basic library instruction (information literacy), much less more in-depth research instruction necessary for capstone and honors courses or senior seminars. Last year, out of 167 FTE faculty (undergrad, grad and continuing ed), 29 brought classes to the library for instruction. In addition, only slightly over a quarter (44) made use of the Library’s Reserve Room services to make supplementary (either required or optional) reading materials available to their students. Many of those items (38% during Spring of 2000) were never used. Circulation transactions dropped by 12%, interlibrary loan transactions dropped by 14% and reference transactions decreased by 8% from 1999 to 2000.

It would be easy to say that this is a trend, and to blame it on the Internet. Indeed our usage statistics for our various databases—especially those offering full text articles—do continue to grow. This is wonderful; certainly high usage helps to justify the high cost of these resources. It is quite possible that students do not need instruction in how to do a search in EbscoHost Academic Premier, and, since they can access it from their dorm rooms, we will not see them in the Library. Unfortunately, we also hear stories of plagiarism and of the assignments that resulted in papers that all cited the same three articles: the first three full-text articles retrieved from EbscoHost. In addition, those high statistics also indicate that students are retrieving vast numbers of “hits” from their searches, making the process of evaluating the retrieved articles so difficult and time-consuming that the first three look awfully attractive—especially when the paper is due tomorrow. More troubling is the fact that some students avoid using Library databases altogether and go directly to Internet search engines. Talk about getting vast numbers of hits!

Are my concerns justified? Is the Library playing its important role in helping the College achieve the outcomes it describes in its self-study? Is the Library doing everything it can do to support faculty as they prepare their students to become life-long learners? How do we ensure that students not only have access to information, but also the critical skills they need to find and evaluate it? As a newer member of the administration, I still have much to learn about academics at Assumption. If anyone would like to discuss these issues further or offer suggestions, I would appreciate it. Please call me at 767-7272.

In the meantime, I would like to go out on a limb and encourage faculty to:

· Work with librarians to design assignments that, over a four-year period, progressively teach general information literacy through specialized subject research.

§ Share students’ research with librarians so that we can see how our resources are being used.

§ Consider joining together to offer a body of courses that are “library intensive.” (This need not mean twenty-page research papers!)

· Offer feedback about library resources and services: what are your needs? What do your students need? What are the barriers to your making greater use of library services?

· Involve library liaisons in curricular changes in order to ensure that library services can support them when they take place.

· Set an example for your students by coming to the library yourself. J

· Select new faculty colleagues who are also committed to teaching their students to create knowledge—building on the knowledge available to them through library resources as well as from textbooks, classroom lectures and labs.

I would encourage administrators to:

· Think of the Library as an essential component of academics at Assumption—not simply a student support service.

· Support librarians’ taking a more active role in the governance of the College.

· Establish a Library Committee to facilitate communication among the Library, faculty, students and administrators.

· Consider the impact of new campus initiatives on Library services and collections.

Finally, I will commit myself and d’Alzon Library staff to:

· Be available and as responsive as possible (read “as budget allows”) to your needs.

· Support you in your efforts to engage your students in critical thinking and, ultimately, knowledge creation through providing library instruction, research guides, and other instructional support.

· Work with you to continue to develop and maintain a collection (both print and digital) that supports your teaching and your students’ learning through acquisitions liaison activities.

· Increase access to electronic resources and to the physical library collections (within staffing constraints) or to materials found elsewhere.

· Assist you in any way appropriate and possible in your recruitment efforts—through offering library tours, lists of materials within a subject area, providing information on library services available to faculty, serving on search committees.

Through increased awareness we can all work together to achieve the goal of educating Assumption students, including those elements of information literacy (essential to developing “capacities for continuing learning”) and knowledge creation (the result of “raising questions and pursuing answers”) that librarians are well-trained to offer and eager to support.

[1] Assumption College Self-Study Report (draft, May 2000). Standard 1: Mission and Purpose, p. [2].

[2]---- Standard 4: Programs and Instruction, "The General Education Curriculum," p. 16 of 32

[3]---- Standard 4: Programs and Instruction, "College-wide Academic Competencies," p. 19 of 32

Word Processing in the Library

In response to concerns expressed by the SGA last spring, the d'Alzon Library has installed five new computers in the Word Processing area on the first floor. Three of the new workstations are Dell PCs, and two are IMacs. Together with two Mac PowerPCs, these new computers should make it possible for Assumption students to combine their research and writing in a single trip to the Library.

Each of the new word processing machines is loaded with MicroSoft Office, Netscape and/or Internet Explorer, and Corel Word Perfect. Bring a floppy disc with you, formatted for the type of computer (Mac or PC) you plan to use, so that you can save your work and take it home with you. (For security reasons, personal files cannot be saved to the workstation hard drives. Any files that are saved to the hard drive will be removed promptly.)

When using these workstations, remember to save your work frequently and please report any problems promptly to Library staff. Even new machines sometimes become ornery, but we will do our best to troubleshoot your problem!

ANNUAL REPORT

We know how curious you must be to find out how we spend our time in the Library. So, to satisfy that curiosity, we would be happy to send you a copy of our 1999-2000 Annual Report. Just e-mail Dawn Thistle (dthistle@assumption.edu) and she'll send one!

Consortium Cross-Borrowing

Any students who may need to borrow materials directly from other Consortium libraries will need to come to the d'Alzon Library circulation desk to receive a WACL (Worcester Area Cooperating Libraries) card. This card will verify to the other library that you are, in fact, a current Assumption College student. Depending on local lending policies, Assumption students may borrow materials from any of the college libraries in Worcester, with the exception of Goddard Library at Clark University.

All faculty members should have received their WACL borrowing cards by the time they receive this newsletter.
Questions? Call x7135.

Subject Liaisons

If you would like to suggest that the library order materials in a particular subject area, please contact the following individuals. While we are continually updating our electronic resources, we spend a substantial amount of the Library’s budget on printed materials and videos and will continue to do so.

Subject Area	Subject Liaisons
Business Studies	Paul Johnson: 767-727
Computer Science	Kim West: 767-7273
Continuing Ed.	Janice Wilbur: 767-7136 Liz Maisey: 767-7384
Economics & Global Studies	Kim West: 767-7273
Education	Carol Maksian: 767-7273
English	Julie O'Shea: 767-7137
Fine Arts	Nina Tsantinis: 767-7076
Foreign Languages	Larry Spongberg: 767-7273
History	Julie O'Shea: 767-7137
Mathematics	Kim West: 767-7273
Music	Dawn Thistle: 767-7272
Philosophy	Nina Tsantinis: 767-7076
Politics	Larry Spongberg: 767-7273
Psychology	Liz Maisey: 767-7384
Science	Carol Barnitt : 767-7201
Social Rehabilitation	Carol Maksian: 767-7273
Sociology	Kim West: 767-7273
Theatre	Andrew Clark: 767-7271
Theology	Nina Tsantinis: 767-7076
Women's Studies	Janice Wilbur : 767-7136

2nd Annual
Electronic
Extravaganza The Emmanuel d'Alzon Library staff once again demonstrated its online databases, web sites, and various electronic services. More than seventy-five people came to try out our resources, pick up freebies, and share some snacks. Each person who watched a demonstration was entered into the raffle contest featuring gift certificates from the Book Store, Charlie's, and Tatnuck Bookseller as well as a golf umbrella and an Assumption portfolio. Attendees who saw two or more demonstrations received a Library Memo Board.

Raffle Winners:		Raffle winner Lisa Yungaitis with Larry Songberg and Carol Maksian
Prof. Pete Murphy	Charlies Gift Certificate
Prof. Maggie Rozear	Charlies Gift Certificate
Ben Tabellione	Golf Umbrella
Lisa Yungaitis	Golf Umbrella
Roberto De la Fuente	Tatnuck Book Seller G.C.
Elizabeth Polomik	Book Store G. C
Richard Kalyoto	Assumption Portfolio
Prof. Nanho Vander Hart	CD-ROM Encyclopedia

Eager attendees helped themselves to the many free items supplied by our library vendors, including pens, mousepads, notepads and pins. Thanks to our vendors: Ebsco, Lexis-Nexis, Encyclopedia Britannica, Electric Library, OCLC FirstSearch, Gale Infotrac, Silverplatter and JSTOR. If you missed the extraordinary excitement of our extravaganza and would like more information, please call (508) 767-7273, or send an email to library@assumption.edu.

Library Information

At the start of each academic year, new faculty members receive a folder of materials describing d'Alzon Library services, including:

Emmanuel d'AlzonLibraryLink

The Newsletter of the Emmanuel d'Alzon Library
Assumption College,Worcester, Massachusetts
Vol. 4 No.2/3

Fall 2000

Emmanuel d'AlzonLibraryLink

The Newsletter of the Emmanuel d'Alzon Library Assumption College,Worcester, Massachusetts Vol. 4 No.2/3

Fall 2000

The Newsletter of the Emmanuel d'Alzon Library
Assumption College,Worcester, Massachusetts
Vol. 4 No.2/3