CCL first began discussing the idea of a shared ILS almost 10 years ago! We talked and talked and talked among ourselves.
And then we talked with others: people in the Chancellor’s Office, technology leaders in the CCC world, stakeholders (think ASCCC, students, CIOs, the League … and so many more), other groups of libraries headed in the same direction.
So in the middle of this crazy time, I want to let you know that because we have been sharing our ideas and “the vision” and how you’ve all been crazy busy using the new system and each other’s discoveries, it has opened minds to the fact that
librarians are strategic thinkers, and work with agility and flexibility, and
librarians have demonstrated the enormous value of the LSP to sustain, improve and expand the CCC frameworks for student learning and student success in a time of crisis.
What the CCC librarians have done is noting short of amazing and even heroic. It may very likely be what gets us the ongoing state funding we have asked for. It may be what helps you achieve an important library milestone at your college or what helps CCC librarians reach for the next great thing after LSP.
Lastly, a down-to-earth note: 100 colleges have paid their CCL membership, and they’re the ones with the star in the CCL directory on the website. Yes, this may be the year when 100 is a really good number, considering! But it’s not too late if you don’t have that star and want to get it. Email me if you need another copy of the invoice.
Reports
Academic Senate for California Community Colleges
By Dan Crump, American River College, CCL Liaison to the ASCCC
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, and in accordance with the “shelter-in” order from Governor Newsom, the ASCCC has cancelled the Spring Plenary Session that was scheduled for April 16-18 in Oakland. The ASCCC Executive Committee also decided that the ASCCC will hold elections this spring electronically to ensure the continuity and leadership of the organization. The positions open for nominations will be president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer, at-large representative, Area A (1-year term), Area B, Area C, and north and south representatives.
The ASCCC has worked collaboratively with system partners (including the Council of Chief Librarians) has put together a series of professional development opportunities (webinars) to address some of the most critical issues facing CCC students and faculty today. to provide the following presentations as a means of supporting faculty in their service to students. (Note: The ASCCC/CCL webinar was on Thursday, April 2. Further information in another article in this Outlook newsletter.)The schedule includes four varieties of events: discipline specific dialogue – small audience discussion format, discipline specific dialogue – large audience format, governance in a state of emergency, and information sessions to assist in the transition to remote instruction and services.
CCL-EAR Chair’s Report
By Steve Hunt, CCL-EAR Committee Chair
What changes we have seen in our work in the last few weeks! I remember a time when electronic resources were an exotic curiosity and now they have become an absolute necessity. Once the closing of a library’s doors would have meant no library services but we have shown we can quickly pivot to online delivery of services and resources. This was only possible because of the many years of work at each library, each college and at the statewide level to develop the necessary infrastructure, tools and services.
We all thought the migration to Alma and Primo was our greatest challenge this year but only a few weeks after go-live on that project we began to hear the first warnings about the current pandemic. We are fortunate to have a modern library services platform that is fully web-accessible and provides integrated access to all library resources. Our work together on that project has helped us deal with the current crisis. Librarians across the state shared advice and assistance to help each other adapt.
Database vendors have been generous and responsive in this emergency and many are offering free access to content. Please take advantage of these offers and consider subscribing to these resources if they would help your students. See also your consortium’s content providers list and the EAR reviews when you are considering products. These resources are vetted by the EAR committee and our consortium director negotiates the best prices for you. The deadline for Spring renewals has been extended and is now May 29th but if you want to add new resources you usually do so at any time.
Textbooks in electronic form are more available than ever with sources like VitalSource and RedShelf and both companies are offering special access for the present time. Those faculty who are using Open Education Resources (OER) such as those provided by OpenStax and the OER Commons are giving their students low-cost access to textbooks. Will libraries still have a role in making textbooks available to students as online access increases?
Things that we’re currently working on in the EAR committee include a comparison review of online anatomy resources and a review of statistics resources. We are looking into the question of open access resources in Primo. Our review format is going to change to make our reviews easier to access and read. Please look at our recent review of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, our reviewers said it would be a great OER resource for faculty looking to provide shared course readings.
If you are interested in looking at new databases and recommending them to other librarians, consider joining the EAR committee. Serving on the EAR Committee is a great opportunity to help select electronic resources for all California community colleges and to network with your colleagues from across the state. Please contact CCL President Leslie Tirapelle if you would be interested in serving on this important committee.
Consortium Director's Report
By James Wiser, Consortium Director
What a difference two months can make! In my last Outlook column, I wrote about how smoothly the library consortium’s transitions over the past year have gone. Today we are all working from home and traveling through a situation that is without precedent for all of us.
The library consortium is here to help. I don’t think we’ve ever been busier adding electronic resources than we have during the last month, and as a reminder, colleges can add new resources at any time. We likely will need to prorate them to align with our existing contracts, so most new orders placed right now will be prorated 15 or so months (April 2020-June 2021). Don’t hesitate to ask me if you need help adding anything new.
Knowing that there may be a lot of uncertainty surrounding our July renewals, I have worked with our vendors to extend the renewal deadline from May 8th to May 29th for subscriptions that renew on July 1. Hopefully these additional three weeks will be of help. If you need additional time, please let me know ASAP so I can inform your vendors. As always, we can invoice you now or after July 1 for any subscription or purchase.
All the best during this stressful time.
Library Services During a State of Emergency
By Dan Crump, American River College
The ASCCC has worked collaboratively with system partners to put together a series of professional development opportunities (webinars) to address some of the most critical issues facing CCC students and faculty today. to provide the following presentations as a means of supporting faculty in their service to students. The ASCCC approached CCL leadership asking if CCL would be interested in partnering with the ASCCC on how library faculty are adjusting to the state of emergency environment. CCL President Leslie Tirapelle appointed me to work with Stephanie Curry, a librarian at Reedley College and a member of the ASCCC Executive Committee as a North Representative, on developing such a webinar.
We had a short timeline and put together a PowerPoint presentation and went online (Thursday, April 2) to present! We tried to highlight the wonderful efforts of librarians to help students and faculty during this extraordinary occurrence---yes, we have a slide that states “Librarians are Awesome!
Some of the things that we covered:
Focus on supporting students and faculty and ensuring instructional continuity.</li>
Library Buildings and Staffing---Totally closed? Partly? Any access?</li>
Computers (and hotspots) for Students---many libraries were involved with college efforts to check out items to students.</li>
Online Resources---ebooks and videos that are available in our collections.
Library Services Platform (LSP)---many librarians lauded the having a cloud-based system that enabled staff to maintain and update services remotely.
Also comments, such as LSP “includes an infrastructure that supports connected library work in support of a common goal: student success” and “ensuring that the unique population we serve has high quality services even when the physical libraries are closed.
Orientations---using video sources such as Zoom and YouTube to provide remote orientations for students.
Canvas---embedding resources (and ourselves) in the course Canvas pages of instructional faculty.
Databases---the CCL-CCLC Consortium suite of databases and others that we have all purchased.
Reserve Textbooks---most libraries have print copies of textbooks, utilizing the resources of textbook publishers and provides, such as VitalSource, RedShelf, Cengage, to provide online versions of textbooks.
You can also go to the ASCCC website (www.asccc.org), click on Events/Past Events/ASCCC: Governance, Remote Teaching and Discipline Discussions/Program/Thursday, April 2.
By Dan Crump, American River College, LLRPAC Co-Chair
There had been a delay in getting appointments from all the constituent groups until early December and with Winter Break and such, the first meeting was held (virtually) on March 9. In discussions about the role of the Committee, it was concluded that a good amount of the initial work on issues be done in workgroups that are more focused to the issue, be it library- or tutoring/learning assistance-related. It was emphasized that while there are differences in some of the issues to be worked on, there are also benefits that can happen because of interaction between the library and tutoring/learning assistance communities (faculty, administrators, and staff). It was decided to have Ted Blake and Dan Crump serve as co-chairs for the committee for this year. Dan will also be serving as the LLRPAC representative to the LSP Governance Committee.
The Committee discussed ways they can help the professional library and learning assistance organizations (CCL and ACTLA) in activities of benefit to all the colleges.
ACTLA is working on a tutoring/learning assistance survey (possibly also working with the RP Group) to assess the tutoring and learning assistance field in CCCs, especially the passage and implementation of AB 705. It was also mentioned the need for discussion about the minimum qualifications for learning assistance coordinators. These MQs are currently only required for college tutoring programs that claim apportionment. Ted noted that he authored a resolution that was adopted at the Fall 2019 ASCCC Plenary Session---“Develop Standards of Practice Resource for Learning Assistance and Tutoring in the California Community Colleges, including the role of Learning Skills Coordinators or Instructors, and Tutoring Coordinators” that should help with this discussion.
The Committee works with CCL on the Annual Data Survey, which is a means of meeting the Title 5 (section 55800) requirement for an annual report to the Board of Governors on the condition of libraries in the California Community Colleges. Dan noted that it has been useful in the past for colleges to use for comparison purposes with other colleges for staffing and budget needs. Brian noted that it has not been useful for that purpose in recent years as the latest available analyzed data is six years old. Dan agreed and noted that CCL has been providing the financial support for the analysis and that CCL leadership has been working with their contracted researcher on this. It was also noted that the response rate from colleges is low and it is necessary for repeated reminders for colleges to submit the survey to the Chancellor’s Office.
Dan will work with CCL leadership and the Chancellor’s Office to improve the response rate and also on getting more current data out to the library community. The Committee will also work with CCL to review and update questions to the Survey.
Dan gave background on the Library Services Platform (LSP), noting that continued funding was not included in the Governor’s proposed budget in January. CCL, the LSP Governance Committee, and other groups have been exploring other opportunities in the budget process. CCL and the LSP Governance Committee sent a memo to Chancellor Oakley and other CO leadership members with a request to fund ongoing LSP operations from the “Streamlining Support and Technical Assistance for California Community Colleges” as outlined in the 2021-22 Legislative Budget Trailer Bill. The Committee concurred with Dan’s request that LLRPAC endorse this request. He and Ted will work on a cover statement to attach to the CCL/LSP memo.
In response to a directive to all state agencies about accessible materials, the Chancellor’s Office removed much of the information from pages (including LLRPAC) on the CO website. It was noted that the CO needs to be sure that all submitted materials are accessible and ADA-compliant and also not to overload the system. At the very minimum, it was decided to have the vision, goals, and charge of the committee on the LLRPAC page, along with a list of the current membership.
Many of the issues discussed by the Committee are dependent on interaction with the Chancellor’s Office. The co-chairs will meet with Raul Arambula to discuss coordination with the Chancellor’s Office. Unfortunately, this has been delayed as the COVID-19 crisis came to the forefront soon after and some things have been put on the back-burner for now.
Membership, 2019-20
Meredith Plummer, Copper Mountain College, Assn of College Business Officers (ACBO)
Ted Blake, Mt. San Jacinto College, Assn of Colleges for Tutoring & Learning Assistance (ACTLA)
Vandana Gavaskar, Santa Barbara City College, ACTLA
David Reed, Cañada College, ACTLA
Monica Doman, Cypress College, Academic Senate for CA Community Colleges (ASCCC)
Reginald Constant, Laney College, ASCCC
Colin Williams, Long Beach City College, ASCCC
Romelia Salinas, Mt. San Antonio College, Council of Chief Librarians (CCL)
Brian Greene, Columbia College, Council of Chief Librarians (CCL)
Dina Humble, San Bernardino Valley College, CIO
Kate Mueller, Coastline College, Chief Student Services Officers (CSSO)
Raul Arambula, Chancellor’s Office, Chancellor’s Office (CO)
Zitali Torres, Chancellor’s Office, Chancellor’s Office (CO)
Dan Crump, American River College, Co-Chair
Conferences/Events
Upcoming Events
Many conferences have been canceled, postponed or moved online. The information below is current at the time of writing.
California Conference on Library Instruction
Canceled
The Academic Library in Prison Higher Education: Merced College at Valley State Prison and Central California Women's Facility
By Karrie Bullock, Merced College
Academic librarians are familiar with wearing many hats, and when I was asked to be the department liaison to the prison program, I was intrigued to find out what that would look like. The Merced College Incarcerated Student program serves two prisons located in Chowchilla: Valley State Prison (VSP) and Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF). The college has expanded class offerings since 2016 and serves approximately 500 students, offering 33 sections between both prisons, and has a steady retention rate of 96%. Most recently, Merced College began initiating transferable degrees in partnership with Fresno State and VSP. Overall, this is a very successful and rewarding program for students, faculty and the college.
I became involved with the incarcerated program in Fall 2018. I began with a search through the literature and found very little available through publications, listservs or conferences that offered insight into how the academic library, specifically community colleges, functioned within the prison setting. Much of what I have adopted and modified has been from public and prison librarians. The unique population of incarcerated students posed challenging obstacles: for delivery all items must be in print, and items must pass through evaluation with the correctional officers. There is no internet and, at the time of this newsletter, no computers for typing assignments or downloading documents. There is very limited access to the prison library due to overlapping work schedules and open library hours. These are just a few of the many, though not insurmountable, barriers to library access.
Merced College faculty and administrators began working on a handbook to guide shifting policy, identify provisions for equitable access, and outline standards and rigor of the college curriculum, with a provision for library policy and access to resources. Regarding library policy, we will lend physical items to the prison but due to the recent COVID-19 closures, our policy discussion has not been resolved. The discussion hinges on questions like who is responsible for items collected and returned to the library, what commitments can prison librarians and prison education managers make to determine storage or what to purchase to support Merced College students, what are the rules for check-in and check-out of material (student ID, how long a student can check an item out, how the student would select the book because they have no internet or access to the catalog, etc.). Also, there is the issue of the online databases and prison librarians’ access to these resources—due to vendor licensure, we could not offer the prison librarians log-ins to the college library databases.
To address the ways the library can support the incarcerated student and faculty, I devised a research request form, and library policy for incarcerated students, all of which can be found through a research guide. The research request form offers space for students to identify their information need (the assignment), review an example of a research question, and then frame a written research question. In February 2020 we held a successful workshop attended by fourteen faculty and three prison librarians, with an opportunity to collaborate and discover ways that the librarians could help meet the needs of faculty and students. We outlined the research request form, library policy, and gave an overview of important information literacy concepts specific to their discipline(s). As an information literacy example, we printed handouts that describe different characteristics and types of information students might request, tying them into the ACRL Framework and library SLOs. The prison librarians were very helpful, offering critical insight into how they help patrons locate information, and when they interact with our students. As previously mentioned, database access is not something we can give prison librarians, though I see this becoming a weightier issue moving forward. The workshop lasted three hours, and there was much spirited discussion around the challenges of locating curriculum, teaching information literacy and information evaluation.
Within two weeks of the workshop, we received 30-40 research requests. The requests take a considerable amount of time, averaging between 20-30 minutes each. I will often delegate the forms to other librarians, but due to the short turnaround time of five working days the job often falls to one person. Two months into the semester we have done over 90 unique research requests for our incarcerated students. Due to the current national emergency, I do not know that we will see many more for the remainder of the semester as the incarcerated college programs have been moved to a correspondence delivery, but many instructors are providing the form in their correspondence packets. Student feedback has been very, very positive, and they appreciate the librarian feedback we write on the research request form. The form also works well for revising their request if they didn’t like the resources they received, and students are encouraged to send in another form with different keywords or concepts. Instructor feedback has been positive: they appreciate the tight turnaround time, printing of resources and delivering it directly to the prison or the instructor.
Issues and trends I have noted include an increase in faculty requests for information "packets" but this is not exclusive to prison teaching. I see this trend of requesting librarians to develop curriculum, especially for remote, "off-site" or distance education environments. Faculty are asking us to develop information packets, with info literacy concepts baked in, but without the ability to teach those concepts. For example, evaluating sources: faculty are asking that we develop multiple packets on topics within their discipline (5 different articles on a given topic), and then covertly include one article that has propaganda or fake news on the topic, but without a clear rubric for identifying why it is fake or misleading. These requests I am happy to help with, but I don’t always feel that this is my role (I am not the instructor of record), and that I am doing a lot of heavy lifting for an instructor. Other issues are: prison librarians in the role of academic librarians; copyright, computers and vendors in the prison; equity of resources between the men and women's access to resources, and many others. I find it surprising that there is very little literature devoted to the academic librarian’s role in the prison higher education environment, but I will say that the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation is a difficult, often obscure system to coordinate with. In the interest of moving higher education into these off-site, highly bureaucratic environments, I believe these issues should warrant greater discussion, and academic librarians are on the front lines of those discussions doing important and rewarding work.
Statewide Initiatives
Primo User Experience: A Brief Review (with Takeaways)
By the LSP Discovery/UX Work Group
The LSP Discovery/UX Work Group looked at a number of Primo user experience studies, and pulled out some common themes. Here, we summarize each theme, offer takeaways to consider, and then link to the relevant studies for further exploration.
Students rarely use scopes
Scopes in a Primo basic search
Scopes have been tested across multiple institutions, and the findings all point to a similar conclusion. Most students don’t notice the scopes, and even when they do notice them, they don’t choose to use them.
Takeaways: Instead of focusing your efforts on scopes, think more closely about your left-hand facets. If, on the other hand, you want your students to use scopes, you will need to emphasize this as part of your library instruction.
Frequently-used facets in Primo,
expanded and minimized views
While most students use facets, they sometimes struggle with locating the facets that are relevant. A few facets appear to be used most often: Scholarly journals, date, full text online, and resource type. Also, expanded facets tend to get used more than minimized ones.
Takeaways: Place most useful facets at the top of the list. Use clear facet labels. Reduce information overload by removing unneeded facets. And, be sure to expand only the facets that matter most to students.
It’s the age-old problem: Library speak! Students don’t understand what “course reserves,” “reference,” “collections,” or “databases” mean. They have a hard time distinguishing between “articles” and “newspaper articles,” and between “reviews” and “peer-reviewed.”
Takeaway: Avoid library jargon - use simple language (for example, “textbooks” instead of “reserves”). Your students will find what they need in less time!
Students are often asked to look for particular types of resources for their assignments (e.g., scholarly articles, books), and yet the labels for format types do not stand out and are often overlooked. While some entries show an icon for a format type, icons are a tricky business that aren’t always intuitive to students.
Unhelpful availability statements confuse students and librarians (e.g., Unavailable, Check for available services, No online access, Check holdings, No full text available). If users can’t discern what action to take, they’ll start seeing those confusing cues as things to avoid.
Takeaway: Say what you mean, using clear labels. Make it as easy as possible for students to get to what they really need - ahem, the full text.
Who doesn’t love watching that push pin fly up to the favorites menu? And yet, some users do not understand the connection between “pinning” items and actually accessing them later on the “favorites” menu!
Takeaway: Clarify your labels, and make sure they are consistent. Change the tool tip of the push pin to say “add to my favorites” instead of “add this item.”
By Maggie Frankel and Katrina Rahn, City College of San Francisco
A group of library staff sit at a blue-paper-covered table folding origami stars and talking, sharing a bowl of kimchi-flavored chips and Girl Scout Cookies. Everyone is relaxed. Drop-ins are welcomed with a chair and no one has been assigned to take notes. A sign on the table asks us, “Have you taken your break today?” This isn’t your average committee meeting or workshop and it isn’t a party.
This was a team development model we cooked up ourselves. And we poured creative ideas into the model: We mused about how we would update the library if given $100,000. We collaboratively drew faces with an exercise adapted from Lynda Barry’s Making Comics. We doodled with markers on scrap paper, strategized on how to better-share information literacy teaching ideas, and made origami paper stars. We consumed snacks. Many snacks. The group met on diverse days and times to accommodate different schedules. Attendance ranged from three to twelve people.
We, of course, are library workers, and these activities diverged substantially from our typical daily tasks that included reference and circulation, teaching, course reserves, systems work, electronic resource management, and much more. We’ve been meeting once a month-- for about an hour at a time-- for the past semester and a half. It’s part of an experiment that has been enacted to foster collaboration among workers of different classifications, to remind us why we love our jobs, engage in self-care, and discuss general wellness as it relates to work.
Since the Shelter in Place mandate, we have taken this show online, complete with positive messages of support and use of an online collaborative drawing platform.
But this wasn’t just about fun and games. It was a rescue effort. Like many workers in public education, we’d spent the past year overwhelmed at the jobs we loved. When we conversed in passing, we spoke of stress and deadlines more than hope and innovation. Reference, Circulation, and Technical Services were all overwhelmed in their silos. Librarians were spread over 12 near-independently functioning-yet-interconnected locations (all functioning as the same college) but could go over a month without seeing one another. Budgets were shrinking. Responsibilities were growing. Indeed, we were getting things done-- big things! In fact, despite the budget cuts and political instability, we participated in the California Community College LSP project as a vanguard, led campus OER initiatives, and served more students through online workshops and live instruction than ever before. We were on the fast track to burnout.
There were periodic college-mandated flex days and faculty travel budgets, but we lacked a mechanism for library-based professional and team development. Something had to be done. One afternoon, we sat down together for half an hour. Things were crazy and we had to fix it. What could we control? How could we make things better with very little time and zero budget? We devised a monthly hour-long meeting. Scheduling a “meeting” somehow legitimized our efforts. We scheduled it on the half-hour to maximize attendance by folks from multiple shifts. We advertised it across all locations, and to both classified staff and faculty at times that would be the most achievable to the most people. We made it low stakes and drop-ins were welcome.
The first meeting took place at a banquet table we’d recently placed in an awkward yet open staff area near the librarian cubicles. We covered the table with some blue paper we had on hand, and it became “the blue table.”
Attendance was greater than expected, and we had to roll up chairs to accommodate a larger group. People came out of both curiosity and professional responsibility-- but all agreed that we’d needed it. We have noticed that a significant number of actionable ideas and reflections have come out of this. We plan to continue this project and use it as a barometer for our team vitality and continued growth. This is a model that can easily be replicated.
YiPing Wang Receives Tenure
Laney College Media & Instruction Librarian YiPing Wang was granted tenure on March 10, 2020. YiPing is known for her thoughtful, engaging orientations that creatively integrate media, activities and discussion. YiPing has played a pivotal role in the college’s development of online educational tools and resources, serving as a faculty trainer and adviser in the use of Canvas and OER. She co-chairs the Distance Education Committee and the Student Success & Equity Committee. Congratulations, YiPing!
