2015TR

TUSCARORA REVIEW 2016

2016 TUSCARORA REVIEW

content. We used to have shelves of print magazines—that’s all you had, and it’s

gone; all of the magazines and journals are digital now. At that time, we had about

200, but now we have collectively about six or seven thousand, so you can see

the magnitude of the difference. We also have a digital book collection now. We

have about 12,000 books in the print collection, and we have about 35,000 in the

digital book collection. Then we have online reference books, online newspapers,

online videos, and an online music collection. We used to have a bunch of old 33

1⁄3 records, and the students would come in, play them on a record player and

listen to them. But now, they can browse a giant library of music from home. We

also have a video collection used by faculty and staff. Let’s say you wanted to look

at a video of cells and how they work. You can go into that collection, pull that

out, and study it. Or your professor can assign it, or you can take a little segment

and put it into a video of your own if you were doing a class project. That’s been

occurring since 1992; the first digital catalogue came then, and we’ve been steadily

adding more and more digital content ever since.

But it’s not just having the content; it’s also the delivery. If you go into the

library website, you’ll see something called research guides. That provides not only

the information but a structure. So if a student asks, ‘What kind of information do

you have on a certain subject,’ it walks you through the process. It has information

on plagiarism, and it has lists of websites on a subject. What we’re also doing with

these is to insert a topic-related research guide into the Blackboard website for

the relevant course. So let’s say you have a project in your class, then you have

the link right there to the research guide. It’s almost like a self-service. Right now

most of the classes have Blackboard, and basically that’s the student worksite

now. If you go out and walk around the library right now, you’ll see the majority

of people using it. So the idea was to bring the relevant library information right

there, so you wouldn’t have to go and open another browser. This is a way of not

only having the digital content, but making it easier to use. It will take some time

to do that but we will gradually have relevant research guides in every Blackboard

course for every course that has some sort of research project.

Tuscarora Review:

Specifically with the renovations, was there anything

you found difficult or frustrating? What successes did you have with the

renovations?

Mick:

Actually, I’ve been involved in renovations before here at FCC. When

this building [Linganore Hall or “L” Building] was built, I was involved in that. So

from that point of view, this process from the very beginning just went perfectly.

We made a presentation for the Board [of Trustees] two years ago. The board

meeting was in March of that year, and we made a presentation saying, ‘Here’s

our vision. We want to take the library, reorganize the space, and get the Writing

Center and Tutorial Services. It will be a big advantage.’ The Board of Trustees

loved it, and said, ‘go ahead.’ We set up a two-person design team. We had

Betsey Zwing, who is the director of the Tutoring and Writing Center. Then on

the library side, our lead was Colleen McKnight. She’s the Digital Services Librarian.

It made sense for a number of reasons for me not to be that person because I

was involved with the self-study. Every ten years, colleges and universities have

an enormous self-study. The whole process takes about two and a half years, and

you produce a one-hundred-page, detailed analysis of all of your operations. It’s a

very big deal. This is the basis for accreditation. I was involved in that very heavily.

And so Betsey and Colleen did extensive planning with site visits, student surveys,

literature review, and case studies. It was a very thorough analysis for what the

Learning Commons would be. Then a formal document is given to the architects,

and they take it and translate it into a statement of purpose: What is the space

supposed to do? It was wonderfully done. It was a team effort, but they [Betsey

Zwing and Colleen McKnight] were the leads.

The architects did a wonderful job translating that into what you see out there

in terms of layout of space. One of the most wonderful things about this building

is if you look at it from the outside, you’ll see there’s windows all the way around.

Everyone knew this is a wonderful feature and we’ll take advantage of it. You

see all glass, so there’s so much light in here. It is just gorgeous and that is very

much by intent. It gives a feeling of openness, and so the architects really nailed

that in terms of perceiving what the space would do. Then it goes over to the

construction people and that went perfectly. We were open a little bit ahead

of time, so we had time to move in here in January [2016] and we were ready

to go. In the fall [2015] when the construction was taking place here, the library,

the Writing Center, and the Tutorial Services were downstairs in two tiny little

rooms. That was difficult, especially for the students, not to have this space. But

it made it possible for these different groups to work together, learn how each

other operates, and learn how to interact. We did a lot of cross-training last fall so

that when we came up here we were ready to go. So that’s what I mean when I

say from the very beginning when we proposed this vision, it couldn’t have gone

better. We had wonderful help from the Board of Trustees, the construction

The Learning Commons still has approximately 12,000 books in its print collection.