Opening of both Sevilla Street and the Director’s Blog

I had been thinking for some time about producing a blog about things here in the Proctor Library, but I found I just could not seem to get my first posting finished. The only thing that made me feel better was looking out the front door of the Library during the days of July and August and seeing how tough it was getting the newly designed Sevilla Street finished and reopened. I really thought I was going to win the race against Sevilla, but when it finally reopened last week, it forced me to get moving and open my blog.

As most of us know, this has been a very exciting summer of construction and improvement here at Flagler College. I am thrilled that students and faculty were able to return to the campus last week and find such a great new environment here. I particularly love what I view as a great “triangle of student life and learning” consisting of the new Ringhaver Student Center, the Proctor Library, and Kenan Hall. Naturally I am pleased to have the Library as the center of two legs of the triangle, and I know we will continue to do our best to support student life and learning at the College.

For those returnees to the College, you will see some changes in the Library. Library staffers Jenny Eason and Mitzi Skeen moved on to other careers this summer, and fortunately other wonderful people joined our staff. Katherine Owens has joined us as a Reference & Instruction Librarian, Christine Wysocki is our new College Archivist and Reference Librarian, and Adam Ehrenberg is our evening Circulation Manager.

To support the growing use of wireless laptops in the Library, we installed easily accessible electrical power outlets on the group study tables on the first floor and similar power is easily available at some 31 other study location throughout the Library. Batteries are nice, but unfortunately they run down at the most inopportune times.

Deaf Education majors may be surprised to find that during the summer we pulled off our shelves most of our books and audio-visual items in any way related to deaf education, deaf life or deaf culture, and we have now consolidated them into a more centralized location which is now called the “Deaf Studies Collection.” This collection is identified by an overhead sign and it is found on the 2nd floor, the low shelves on the north end.

We have recently added a couple other very valuable resources and tools for you to use this academic year, but I must admit that they are so new that we are still learning them ourselves and I will hold off describing them until my next blog posting. As a hint, just remember “ebrary” and “360 search.” And if you find them, try them out.