Virtual Academic Library Environment of New Jersey

The traditional role of catalogers over the past twenty years has evolved in a manner reflective of the technological revolution of the latter part of the twentieth century and the digital explosion of the present century. This poster will present data resulting from a survey of catalogers working in New Jersey academic libraries regarding how their work, title and department name have changed. Many catalogers have evolved from performing strictly cataloging duties to preparing and managing metadata for numerous and varied digital resources, as well as performing more actively within the university community as a whole.

Our session documents the development of the Sprague Library Community in Blackboard which was created with the assistance of our IT Department. After having tried traditional methods for communicating with students like webpages, news feeds, and listservs with limited success, we decided to experiment with the Community feature in Blackboard. The Library Community includes sections for Announcements, a Featured E-resource, a Newsroom, Library Trivia, a Discussion Board, a Suggestion Box, Library Info, and a Librarian Spotlight. Community content highlights Library services and resources. Everyone with a Blackboard account is registered in our Community. Usage, so far, has been encouraging.

Meeting the challenge of learning in a digital world is difficult in many developing countries such as Liberia. Internet access is slow, unstable, and expensive. The lack of internet services along with virtually no access to important engineering information limits teaching and research, and widens the "digital divide." The EAKO System project will provide published engineering content and training materials to the University of Liberia, without the need for internet access and at a low cost. Engineering information will be stored on high capacity hard drives accessed at a library information kiosk. Future development of this project will allow access via mobile devices.

Faculty-librarian collaboration at TCNJ has created an innovative Chemistry Seminar Program while piloting a new role for librarians - the integrated librarian. The program enhances skills of undergraduate chemistry majors and raises the students’ awareness of the value of a commitment to lifelong professional and personal enrichment. The program consists of three interrelated segments: Advising, Chemical Information Literacy and Good Laboratory Practice (GLP). Advising begins as prescriptive advising and grows into developmental advising with emphasis on resume writing, interviewing skills and career options. Chemical information literacy consists of formalized instructional sessions followed by three assessments. GLP begins with teaching fundamental principles and often culminates in supporting faculty-student research.

National History Day (NHD) is a competition for students in grades 6 through 12. In the process of conducting research and creating a final project, History Day students learn how to do college level research while in middle school and high school. In addition to providing general information about History Day this poster will also describe a recent study that confirmed that NHD students not only develop strong research skills, but have better written and oral communication skills than non-History Day students. The poster will also identify ways that academic librarians can support and encourage History Day students.

IR+ is a new digital repository software available from the University of Rochester. The software enables members of the community to create personal private workspaces, portfolio pages and contributor pages. Although IR+ was created with a user-centered design, the implemented product was found to inhibit the scholarly communication process with usability problems and a lack of librarian-orientated features. The poster will reflect on the implementation of IR+, usability issues of the software and valued features of the software during IR+ lifecycle.

One of Bergen Community College Library’s challenges has been our ongoing commitment to enhance our library catalog for easy and timely access to our collections. The Library has taken initial steps which focus on the following changes: (a) Loading Marc records for streaming video, audio and e-book bundles into the catalog and creating new material types and icons for these collections; (b) Enhancing Marc records for philosophy, religion and literature collections to improve access; (c) Creating original Marc records for each database with multiple access points including links to Libguides; and (d) Loading Patron Driven Acquisition records into the catalog. This poster session will examine the impact of the changes on our users, lessons learned and the state of our library’s catalog today and in the future.

RapidILL is a resource sharing system created by the interlibrary loan staff at Colorado State in 1997. Librarians from NJIT and Rutgers will describe the features of the system, their experiences as members of RapidILL, and the cost/benefits of joining. The fees and service commitment libraries must make to participate, as well as benefits to users, will be presented. RapidILL’s pod system and what it would take to create a VALE pod will also be described.

This poster session will highlight the activities of the NJLA CUS/ACRL-NJ Research Committee, which promotes research among all librarians in New Jersey. Dedicated to supporting and encouraging the sharing of information about research projects, we are looking to recruit new members as well as mentors/mentees for our research mentorship clearinghouse initiative, which we hope will foster connections and collaboration among librarians in all fields and types of libraries. Recent award winners will be highlighted. Information on submitting research for this year’s research award and research forum will be available.