Campus Updates

[grimesb]

SUNYIT and CNSE are now officially the SUNY Polytechnic Institute.  We are learning our way through the maze of how things are done at the Albany campus of SUNY Poly.  Cayan Library in Utica is the library for both campuses.  UAlbany is gradually easing the professors and staff over to us.  UAlbany's Mary Casserle has been so helpful during the transition.  The faculty became part of SUNY Poly in August.  The students will move to SUNY Poly some time in 2015.  We are working closely with key faculty and staff members on our Albany campus to purchase databases and journals that are needed as a result of the merger. 

We are also conducting a library director search.  We have extended the search and are in the process of bringing more candidates to both campuses.  We are hopeful that we will find just the right person to steer us through the changes ahead.

Chris Kobos, our longtime evening reference librarian, retired in August. We will miss her as will the students.  We have hired Allison Fiegl as a temporary replacement to cover our evening hours. 

We are happy to host the September meeting of SUNYLA in Utica.

[Susanna]

We were in the third group for EDS and are delaying our public launch until January.  We need to figure out a few more things, revise a few research guides and adjust our instruction and training practices more thoroughly than our little window allowed.  Classes started early for us this fall!

The Library began offering video recording services about a year ago - sending someone to class with a video camera to capture student presentations or having students in speech class, for example, come individually to be recorded, and then posting the videos to Angel/BB.  Use for that service is picking up.  Additionally, the Library started offering to capture lectures and guest lecturers or otherwise help gather and post instructor-generated content for online and hybrid classes. 

The writing center is housed within the library, and we have encouraged writing adjuncts to use our space (we have a couple of rooms adjacent to where writing tutoring happens) for their office hours.  For the adjuncts, it's a welcome alternative to the "bull pen" that is otherwise available to them.  For us, we are building relationships and reinforcing connections between the writing and the research processes.

And in the next SUNYLA Newsletter you'll see a few other tidbits from TC3.  I'm trying not to repeat myself! 

[Kristy Lee]

New Paltz has a new delegate to SUNYLA starting September 2014. Her name is Anne Deutsch.

Anne will be joining the conference call tomorrow, and she will introduce herself to the group.

[cmarten]

Like others, it was a quiet summer at SUNY Purchase.  We did implement EDS and some of our librarians are currently updating some of our tutorials to reflect the changes. 

The Library staff also held a retreat last Spring to discuss the results of our recent LibQual survey and developed four working groups to work on responding to the areas of greatest concern among our patrons.  Those groups are focusing on library policies (we are overhauling our external and internal policies and bringing them together in one LibGuide), quiet zones (we already have a system in place that our patrons love, but are working to improve them further), collections engagement (working to bring more of our collection to the attention of our patrons, we have a new display case out in front of our reference desk and currently have a display of recently passed authors: Maya Angelou, Nadine Gordimer, Thomas Berger and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a display for banned books week, next month we will have two displays, one for LGBT month and another for Domestic Violence month),  and an internal technology training group (this group will work primarily to better train library staff of how to use certain software that all our patrons use and often need troubleshooting help with).

Two other events of note are the licensing of Atomic Learning services and an Antonio Frasconi exhibit in the library, further details of both will be in the Fall SUNYLA newsletter.

And, as you can see in the Conference Report, planning for the 2015 SUNYLA Conference here at SUNY Purchase is ongoing.  Hope to see you here June 3-5th!  The theme will be 'The Art of Librarianship'.

[Jenny Collins]

SUNY Delhi

We had a relatively quiet summer at SUNY Delhi. Several of our librarians and staff attended conferences ranging from SUNYLA’s own annual conference, the Conference on Instructional Technology to one of the ALA pre conference’s in Las Vegas. Over the summer holiday we weeded the reference section and participated in annual collection maintenance and weeding in a variety of subject areas. The weeding of the reference section gave the library shelf space to create a new section at the entrance to the library. This new space acts as a staging ground to present new acquisitions and act as a display area for events like Banned Books week.

The beginning of the school year has been both exciting, hectic and all around everything a fall semester should be.

SUNY Delhi is premiering it’s online Masters in Nursing program. It is the colleges first graduate level degree and the library is doing our best to make sure the program has the best library support available.

Our library liaison for health sciences and nursing, Amanda Calabrese (formerly Mitchell), moved to a distance position in August. She is  still a valued employee at Delhi and a member of the library staff but now reports in from off campus. She and the other librarians are exploring ways to have her become and embedded library and to extend library services for the online students, particularly those in the new MSN program.

On campus we’ve had a productive first few weeks. A new scavenger hunt style library tour in which students use twitter to send pictures and answers premiered at orientation weekend. The scavenger hunt activity had great student turnout and has since been used in two instructional sessions in place of a traditional tour. Each time a group completes the scavenger hunt we’re learning more about how students retain information and the library staff continues to make adjustments to improve the activity.

The Resnick Library has also hired a new library adjunct, Carrie Fishner to assist as we adjust to Amanda moving off campus. Carrie is a welcome addition to staff and is working on reference and instruction.

We’re also exploring a more comprehensive approach to social media, the effort is ongoing.