Are things disappearing from the Proctor Library?

Are we aware that things are disappearing from the Library? Those of you who frequent the Library will notice that some very familiar items have been disappearing this semester. These include paintings from the gallery space on the first floor, microfilm reels and microfilm equipment from the Research Room, and even books from the collections. Fortunately for us all the removals of these items have been planned.

Gallery wall minus Flagler Era paintings

For example, this past week eight Flagler era paintings were removed from the gallery area on the first floor of the Library in order to provide the opportunity for the College to enhance the security environment for these historic treasures. Hopefully the paintings will either be returned soon in a much more secure mode, or else we may substitute a similar collection of quality art pieces to be exhibited in the gallery space.

Our removal of microfilm reels and microfilm equipment has been much slower. Last spring we determined that we needed some of the space then occupied by the microfilm to create a quiet study area in the Research Room. At the same time there was also a need to expand the adjacent room which houses technology equipment, so plans were initiated to convert the remaining freed up floor space to that purpose. We were able to make both of these spaces available because students have substantially reduced their use of microfilm as a result of the more efficient access to journal page images provided today via subscriptions to the electronic databases-- particularly JSTOR, Proquest, Ebscohost, and Wilson Omnifile. We were able to reduce our microfilm holdings from 17 cabinets down to only 3 cabinets, and need only 2 reader printers (of the original 6) to access the remaining microfilm. As a result, we ended up with approximately 6,000 reels (75 storage boxes) of microfilm, 14 microfilm cabinets, and 4 reader printers to be removed.

Surplus reader printers & cabinets

Finding “good homes” for the microfilm and its associated equipment has been interesting. Florida’s Bureau of Braille and Talking Books Library Services was the first to pick up 6 of our microfilm cabinets to store the master cassette recordings of their talking books. Our local St. Augustine Foundation, accepted one of our reader-printers, and now is finally able to print copies of their valuable historic microfilm at their own location. The remaining 3 reader-printers and one cabinet will soon be provided to the St. Augustine Historical Society Research Library, and the Florida State Library in Tallahassee will be the recipient of the final 7 cabinets.

75 boxes of surplus reels of microfilm

Our 6,000 reels of microfilm are also disappearing, but a bit slower. Seven years worth of the New York Times and twenty-five years of the William & Mary Quarterly will help the Volusia County Public Library fill in some gaps in their coverage. Unfortunately we did have a setback recently. We had geared up to provide 31 years of the New York Times, and our holdings of 14 separate political and international affairs journals to the University of Kurdistan Hawler Library in Erbil, Iraq via a very special cooperative effort involving the Southeast Florida Library and Information Network (SEFLIN), Florida Atlantic University (FAU) Library, and the U.S. Army Civil Affairs in Iraq. However, after an initial shipment of five boxes to SEFLIN, we had to suspend subsequent shipments because the U.S. Army Civil Affairs unit has left the Erbil area. We maintain hope that a new delivery channel can soon be established, and that we will be able to continue to help the cooperative effort of SEFLIN and FAU to enhance the English language holdings in that Iraq library.

University of Kurdistan Hawler Library

Finally, as we continue to review sections of our books collection for both currency and relevancy, we identify books that we judge to no longer belong or be needed in our collection and we “weed” them out. These weeded books are disposed of in three different directions. Damaged books and those including information which is out of date are permanently disposed of. Books that still have a market value and have the potential to earn some funds that can be used to purchase new books for the Library are being set aside and will soon be shipped to a used book broker. All remaining books are moved to book carts that are periodically moved out to the lobby of the Library and made available as “give away" books for all members of the Flagler community.

Carts of "give away" books

So things really are disappearing from the Proctor Library. But at least for the items described above the removal is carefully planned and controlled.

40th Anniversary

What a memorable and fun day! Today the College has been busy celebrating our 40th Anniversary with a party on the west lawn just in front of the entrance to the Library. Most classes have been cancelled for the day, and students and others from the college community have been enjoying the food, music, games, and even the speeches that are part of the anniversary party.



Yes, our 40th Anniversary…with our beginning point being the year 1968. Naturally these past 40 years have been very important to the College, and as I reflected a bit, it suddenly occurred to me that these years have been very important for me personally as well. Just as the College was beginning its history in fall 1968, I was also beginning my career in libraries in fall 1968 serving in my first librarian position, as the assistant librarian at a high school in New Jersey. So now 40 years later the College and I are both celebrating our 40th anniversary at the same time. What a coincidence.

As we finish these 40 years I would love to be able to document the College’s history in images, but that is outside my sphere. However, the College’s library has had its own history and I thought I would briefly share some images of what I have found to be an interesting evolution of the physical library over the 40 years.

The historic Hotel Ponce de Leon, the centerpiece of the campus, was the home of the first two “editions” of the library.

The Original Library (1968) was located in the hotel’s solarium on the fourth floor.

Library users could even enjoy the solarium’s outside deck.

As the library’s collection grew, it had to be moved in 1972 to a larger space, the hotel’s Grand Parlor, which is now known as the Flagler Room.

In 1982, the Grand Parlor (Flagler Room) was able to regain its beautiful spaces, as the library was moved to neighboring Kenan Hall. The library, then known as the Louise Wise Lewis Library, consisted of three levels and its entry was on the 3rd floor of Kenan Hall. The ceiling heights had to be low to allow the library to fit its three levels between floors 2 & 3 in Kenan.

Finally, in 1996 the College completed construction of our present, free-standing library, the Proctor Library, named in honor of then President, now Chancellor, William L. Proctor.

I fortunately had the privilege of joining the College in 1996, and as a result I also have had the privilege of enjoying the legacy of the College and the evolution of the College library. Happy 40th Anniversary Flagler College.

Research Room reconfigured into "quiet space"

In my April 2008 blog I described how pleased I was about our students’ suggestions concerning the importance of carving out some quiet space in the Library, which like most academic libraries has become an active but somewhat noisy learning place. Actually back in October 2007 an individual student had emailed the Library with an especially compelling argument for more quiet in the Library, so we had already started some planning for setting aside and configuring some better quiet space, but the significant number of student suggestions received in response to the Library’s Biennial Student Survey, Spring 2008 (and from a quick follow up survey) reinforced the need for us to establish a clearly designated quiet room and prompted us to action this summer in reconfiguring Room 133, the glass enclosed O’Keefe Research Room, as a “Quiet Room.”


Room 133 had formerly been referred to by many simply as the “microfilm room” because as one looked into the room much of the floor space was taken up by 8 separate microfilm reader/printer machines and 16 very large cabinets containing microfilm reels holding our historical back file of journal issues. In addition, the perimeter of the room was filled with 16 computer workstations, so the room could easily become a crowded, and even noisy, place as well.

With the increased availability of journal back files on the online electronic databases to which the Library subscribes, and the preference of students to access the issues online rather than on microfilm, we found no need to continue to take up unnecessary floor space, so we reviewed our holdings and reader/printer use, and we were able to cut down to only 2 reader/printers and 3 cabinets in the room. We also removed and relocated 7 computer workstations to an alternate space elsewhere on the first floor of the Library in order to leave carrel and table space for those wishing to work without the distraction of a desktop computer, or with tabletop space on which to use their own laptops. 9 computer workstations were left in the room.

So Library Room 133, the O’Keefe Research Room, is now designated as a “Quiet Room” with signage and posted rules targeted at providing a good space for individuals to engage in quiet work and study. The mixture of furnishings—a reduced number of computers and microfilm equipment, uncluttered study carrels and tables, and even a few individual chair arrangements—should make the area more conducive to this quiet work and study. Quiet will be monitored by the Library staff, and the staff will respond to any infractions.

We have been pleased to be able to respond to the suggestions of the students, and we look forward to this newly configured space complementing the noisier, but very active, other learning spaces throughout the Proctor Library.

What are our hopes for our students? How will digitized collections impact?

As the College begins the new academic year, all of us in the Library are targeting once again on our stated Vision which in part is to be “a full “learning partner” closely collaborating with the students, faculty and staff of Flagler College to achieve the goal of “engaged higher learning” as a culture within the College.” This Vision looks to accomplish this goal in two forms--one is as a “virtual library” providing high quality and technologically accessible digitized content to the College community no matter where the members are located, and the other is as a “library place” providing a centralized learning facility where students gather comfortably with others to: access and explore information drawn from a variety of formats; analyze this information in group discussions; and effectively produce quality presentations and similar products that demonstrate their learning outcomes within a service-rich, comfortable learning environment.

We will continue during this academic year to pursue this Vision, but to be honest it is not easy, particularly as one has to struggle to fully understand the impact of digitized collections on the physical library as well as on learning and teaching. It is with this background that I was delighted to discover a recent talk that addressed this exact topic. The talk was titled “Scholars Perspective: Impact of Digitized Collections on Learning and Teaching.” It was just presented in June 2008 to a Research Libraries Group (RLG) Symposium, in Philadelphia. The presenter was Dr. David Harrington Watt, who is both Director of General Education and Associate Professor of History at Temple University. I highly recommend a reading of a copy of his talk which is available at http://www.oclc.org/programs/events/2008-06-04a.pdf.

Dr. Watt’s combination of responsibilities provides a wonderful perspective with which to look at our topic of interest. As Director of General Education he has responsibility for promoting the elusive concept of “information literacy” at Temple because Temple requires that there must be an “information literacy” component in every general education class, and "information literacy" includes and is tied closely to students understanding and effectively using the digitized collection. At the same time, as Associate Professor of History Dr. Watt has empathy with his fellow faculty members who really can’t fully make sense of this category called “information literacy” and he sees that the faculty are resistant to making it part of their courses. Here at Flagler, we are still in the early stages of helping students (and faculty) fully understand and effectively use the digitized collections as well as traditional resources. This is our own “information literacy” goal, so we are obviously very interested in Dr. Watt’s observations and comments.

But in Dr. Watt’s words:

“So there is the bad news: we are living in a world in which there is good
reason to believe the students really do need to work on their informational
literacy and which faculty seem resistant to helping them do so.”

However, Dr. Watt also gives some better news because he suggests that one can negotiate through this dilemma by not hitting the faculty with the concept of “information literacy” but instead start learning from the faculty what hopes they have for their students. He has seen hopes expressed by faculty in such ways as:

“I want them to be able to distinguish between relative reliable primary sources
and ones that are less reliable.”

“I want them to compare the data they get from reading physical primary sources
with that they get from reading from digital sources.”

In reality these are “information literacy” objectives but they really were not requested as such from the faculty. This is a lesson we can use here at Flagler.

Dr. Watt offered many other interesting thoughts in his talk concerning the impact of digitized collections on the physical library. For example, one challenge he mentions is the disappearance in many cases of professors running into other professors in the library, and of professors running into students. He had a good feeling about professors and students running into each other, and at the time they probably were involved in a common endeavor in research in one topic or another. Today he sees this same research going on, but the professor is in his office and the student may be in a computer lab. It ceases to be a common endeavor. He misses that interaction of students and professors within the physical library. Fortunately here at Flagler we still have several faculty working together with their students, helping them understand that all formats of information have value in research and many of these formats are only available in a physical library.

As the same time Dr. Watt also described the high value of the digital collections that are acquired today by libraries for use by students and other researchers. He presented the story of the undergraduate student from Temple who was able to write and publish an article in a scholarly journal using the digitized collection, "Early English Books Online," available to him through Temple’s library. He would probably never have been able to accomplish this in the past because of lack of timely access. While Flagler College may not be at the same level as Temple University with digitized collections--in particular collections of primary source documents--our own current digitized periodicals collections and subscriptions, including such ones as JSTOR, ATLA and PsycArticles, do provide access to thousands of digitized journal titles usable for research, as do our access to digitized collections of over 85,000 book titles.

So going back to my initial paragraph, I am pleased to say that our library is continuing to move forward toward achieving our vision, and I think Dr. Watt’s talk may give us some important thoughts to build upon as do our work. I again suggest a reading of a copy of his talk at
http://www.oclc.org/programs/events/2008-06-04a.pdf

Isn't it great that they care?

It has been a thrill over the past couple weeks for us to witness how our Flagler students have helped the Library by providing excellent feedback to us in three different surveys that we hit them with during that time. Many of these same students had just finished taking the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and/or the Student Satisfaction Survey. We waited patiently until these important College administered surveys were completed, and then we released our own library satisfaction survey (routinely administered every other year) and a short instruction assessment survey. Not only have we been pleasantly surprised by the numbers who completed our surveys, but also by the care taken in providing us with excellent written comments -- some positive, some negative but always in an honest and very constructive manner. And what's amazing is that they answered these surveys in the last weeks of the semester, when final papers were due and when they were starting to prepare for final exams.

We then further complicated their lives by hitting them with a third survey even before the other two were closed out. Early results of our satisfaction survey indicated that there could be a potentially serious noise problem within Library that we want to address before the next semester begins, if it is truly a problem. We decided to ask the students’ help first to clarify the impact of noise in the Library on each one of them, and second to offer suggestions to us on how we might improve the situation. The electronically administered survey (SurveyMonkey) consisted of only one question plus space for comments and suggestions, and we were amazed at how rapidly the responses came back to us on this particular survey. About half of the respondents provided substantial comments typically running from four to eight lines long. It is obvious in most of the comments that the students wrote them with care and concern for the success of the Library, and many students even indicated that they were pleased we asked for their help.

I only regret that I am not able to take immediate action on all the excellent suggestions offered in all three of the surveys we administered, but we will be paying close attention to all of them and many changes will be acted upon this summer before classes begin again in the fall. I will report these changes to students in this blog and in other Flagler communication channels. Equally important, the students will see many changes when they return in the fall.

Isn’t it great that they care?

National Library Week - Busy Times in Proctor Library

It is very fitting that National Library Week is taking place at this time. This week is the mid-point of three weeks that make up probably the busiest and most critical period of the year in the Proctor Library. This is a time when our "circle of knowledge" normally hits its peak, as the academic year is coming to an end, final research papers and presentations are being competed for submission, and students begin their serious study for final exams which take place next week. The Library will continue to be a major contributor to help ensure that students have full opportunity to achieve their own goals for the period.

The Library will begin extended hours on Wednesday, April 16 and these extended hours will continue through the completion of exams. The exact hours follow:

Wednesday, April 16----7:30 a.m. - 2:00 a.m.
Thursday, April 17------7:30a.m. - 2:00 a.m.
Friday, April 18---------7:30 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Saturday, April 19------10:00a.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Sunday, April 20-------11:00 a.m. - 2:00 a.m.
Monday, April21--------7:30 a.m. - 2:00 a.m.
Tuesday, April22-------7:30 a.m. - 2:00 a.m.
Wednesday, April23----7:30 a.m. -2:00 a.m


National Library Week and Proctor Library


National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

Everyday, libraries in big cities and small towns, in businesses, in schools, and in universities and colleges like Flagler College help transform our different communities, by bringing members of the community into the "circle of knowledge."

In fulfilling its vision, the Proctor Library is dedicated to collaborating with the students, faculty and staff of Flagler College to achieve the goal of effective learning and to be an essential and critical resource for active student learning as well as “lifelong learning” for the entire College community. A major element in the Library's mission is to help students and other users become information literate individuals who will be lifelong learners who can grow in their career and be productive citizens.

As the academic year is coming to an end, we in the Proctor Library are striving to continue on the right track toward achieving our mission and vision elements noted above and hope we are helping members of the Flagler College community enter the "community of knowledge." To assess our success and progress, we are currently in the process of conducting a library user survey which we do every two years. This survey is sent out to a representative sample of students and faculty, and after analyzing the results and identifying areas for improvements, we will work in the coming months toward making any adjustments necessary. We have already started receiving completed surveys from students, and they have been providing us with some excellent observations and recommendations--including some action areas that will clearly require our attention before next year. It is clear that the Flagler College community is working effectively to help the entire community grow and improve.

In the meantime, all members of the Proctor Library staff will be dedicating ourselves over the next two weeks to keeping the Library's resources and services available to help the students in their completion of papers and projects and their study for final exams.

While most students have already completed their actual research by this time and are mostly involved in the final writing of their papers and completion of their other projects, the Library's reference librarians will still receive some end of the semester reference questions. Some may even resemble those coming from the student in the following video/audio clip. But we hope they don't :-)

National Library Week: Reference Desk video clip

Getting different perspectives in the Library

My previous blog treated one of my early morning walks through the library with no one around and with only my observations and my imagination to lead me to a few guesses about what had occurred in the library the evening before.

Other walks I make through the library reveal activities one would expect, but there also are always surprises. Today was one of those days. My reference librarian Katherine came up to me and asked, with a smile on her face, if I had been up to the second floor to see what one of the art classes was doing up there. This had me a bit concerned because normally when an art class visits the oversize books in our art collection seem to escape from their organized shelves and migrate all around the second floor. As I said in my previous blog, it sometimes seems like a hurricane has hit. Katherine assured me this was not the case this time, but that there were art students working all around the second floor. I had to see for myself, and what I indeed found were students with their sketch pads all around the second floor--some sitting on the floor, some in chairs, and even some on the top of our shelving.I learned from their professor, who was accompanying them, that they were observing and sketching various spaces in the library that allowed them to understand and illustrate "perspective." Aisles between ranges of bookshelves, long expanses of floor space, and many other areas on the library's second floor gave them the opportunity to illustrate a variety of perspectives. Once again it was a casual walk for me around the second floor, but just as the art students were observing different perspectives, so was I.

Just beyond one of the artists, I observed four students using the library catalog to identify books or other material probably for a more traditional library research project. I then passed one of the corner study rooms just as a scheduled behavioral science class was finishing up. And finally I returned shortly after noontime to a busy first floor where other learning activities, and even some social ones, were going on.

The learning activities of the art students today contributed in yet another way to help the Proctor Library facilty grow as an active center of learning. I am pleased to have had them working here and that we all have been able to enhance our perspectives on the Library.