The Brooklyn College Library
Comments submitted by the Library staff in response to the draft strategic plan included:
If flagship programs, why not a flagship library and center for academic computing?
When Brooklyn’s new Library is complete, there will be no other library building in CUNY that can compete with it, in terms of size, facilities, and digital collections. We are also the acknowledged leaders in CUNY in academic computing. By developing special library and technology services for faculty and students at other campuses, our Library could position itself to become a flagship within the University.
The strategic plan encourages (1) expanding the Library’s digital collections, (2)
extending off-campus access to students, and (3) increasing the visibility of the
Library’s growing e-collections by adding a conspicuous link to them from the College
website’s top page. We support these three recommendations.
The College should take the opportunity to link information literacy with Core Studies.
Effective this year, Middle States requires every college or university considered for re-
accreditation to have an information literacy program which is incorporated with
instruction. A logical extension of this role is librarians’ partnering with classroom faculty
to structure Core courses that incorporate the principles of information literacy.
The draft strategic plan speaks of the College’s commitment to “intensify its
engagement with the surrounding neighborhoods, the borough’s communities, and its
organizations.” The Library and the History Department’s joint minor in Archival
Studies & Community Documentation is an important tool for achieving this goal.
Brooklyn College students who are planning careers as teachers, as well as persons who
are already teaching in the Brooklyn schools, need specialized technology training and
research assistance. As a result of our TIIAP “Learning Café” Project, both the Library
and AIT have experience in delivering such services. We propose strengthening our
teaching-with-technology program for teachers and future teachers (perhaps
connected with the proposal above under Entrepreneurship).
The draft strategic plan also mentions the College’s interest in creative business
ventures. When the new Library is completed, Library staff and faculty are eager to pilot
the sale of information services to local businesses and the NYC school board. As
businesses move into Brooklyn, their employees will have library and research needs. As
the premiere academic library in Brooklyn, we should meet those needs on a for-fee basis.
At the same time, Brooklyn’s teachers need similar library services: we would like to
explore providing them, under contract to the school board.
Academic Information Technologies & Teaching with Technology
list of priorities (September 5, 2000; see below) and the College in its draft strategic plan
give considerable prominence to a Core Curriculum and to expanding the use of technology
for teaching. She proposed that Academic Information Technologies address these two
goals by joining with faculty partners to develop a fund of interdisciplinary Web-delivered
content modules. This new approach would target Core Courses, but also be valuable and
available for all courses: it would produce an immediate impact across the entire
curriculum. The modules created would be:
Leveraged: that is, they could be used in more than one course, and in more
than one discipline.
Documented and archived, so that they can be enhanced and reused from
semester to semester.
Available to all faculty who are developing course sites, for incorporation
with their work.
These content modules could be integrated into many courses in many disciplines.