Information Services


http://library.brooklyn.cuny.edu/about_library/reference.htm

"While providing full reference service until the very end of the summer session, staff also readied themselves for the move. The move out was not as difficult as the move in. Nonetheless, while a magnificent new facility awaited us, the staff experienced growing pains as we settled into our new home. Despite floods, weird building vibrations, incessant false fire alarms, plus a host of telecommunication issues, the staff began offering the finest professional library assistance to our students and faculty. Kudos to them !" Anthony Cucchiara, Associate Librarian for Information Services & Distinctive Collections

  • A New Organizational Structure for a New Building
    With the move to the new Library, Government Publications and Microforms expanded its responsibilities to include the Periodicals portion of the unit formerly known as Periodicals and Reserves. These staff are now part of a new unit which occupies the entire lower level of the Library and includes everything in the collections that is serial in nature; the unit's name is Periodicals, Government Publications, and Microforms.

  • The New Building Introduces Other Changes
    A beautiful new facility brings both great joy and new responsibilities. At almost 300,000 square feet, the new building is simply too large to be left in the hands of part-time professional staff on the weekends. Thus, a member of the full-time professional staff is now scheduled to cover weekend hours, working alongside an adjunct.

  • Reference Service

    "The most difficult part of our work often turns out to be helping readers articulate an actual question. I was pleased to see this topic included in the English I workshop handout that we are using. Training support staff to ask follow-up questions rather than simply responding to the initial query--no matter how vague--is one of the hardest parts of training. I must mention their enthusiasm for working with the students. They genuinely enjoy it and are always willing to go the extra mile to help.

    "Many users, after three years of paging, are baffled by the notion that they should fetch their own materials. There are many requests (demands) that we accompany them to the stacks. I have prepared guides and maps for the staff at the desk so that more precise location information can be provided when sending students off to the stacks." Jane Cramer, Periodicals, Government Publications & Microforms Librarian

  • E-Reference
    In the fall 2001 Chief Librarian Barbra Higginbotham charged an E-Reference Task Force:

    "As I mentioned at our last department meeting, I am interested in electronic reference at Brooklyn College. I am asking the five of you to serve on a task force on e-reference, to be chaired by Beth Evans, to determine where we go from here, and to organize a pilot for spring 2002. Among the issues to be considered are:
    1) Who is our target audience?
    2) Where are they located when posing questions--in the Library, or elsewhere?
    3) During what hours should e-reference be offered?
    4) What technology should be employed (e-mail; chat)? If chat, which software package?
    5) Should we seek other institutions as partners? (Within CUNY, extra-CUNY, in our time-zone, in other time zones?)
    6) How can e-reference best be integrated with the rest of the Information Services' staff's responsibilities? What role might there be for well-trained supporting staff?
    "I would like to see a pilot in place, beginning in April, so that the approach we choose is well-tested before we occupy the new Library."

    Task force members include Beth Evans, Anthony Cucchiara, Jocelyn Berger-Barrera, James Castiglione, Emma Lee Yu, and Alex Rudshteyn. The group had scarcely begun its work than we found an unexpected partner for chat services in ITS: learning that the Library was interested in real-time online reference service, ITS director Mark Gold proposed that his unit and the Library collaborate to select software that could be used broadly across campus for student/faculty and student/staff communication. In the spring 2002 Student Technology Fee funds were used to purchase the selected package (PHP-Live http://www.phplivesupport.com/), and during the 2002-03 academic year, reference librarians have experimented with the new software. The sticking point seems to be the ability to establish separate identities for each librarian; we plan to implement service in the fall 2003.