Textbooks and the Library: What Can Students Expect?

Textbook Costs Can Be Overwhelming

Tuition has risen over the years, but it's not the costs of enrollment, but the cost of textbooks that's a bigger and more serious challenge for LBCC students. After admission to their classes students go shopping for their books, and required texts can easily cost them $300, $500, or more for a semester. For some, this sticker shock can be a “deal breaker,” the end of their college aspirations.


The Library Wants to Help

The library can’t afford to buy copies of every textbook assigned each semester at LBCC, and keeping pace with the new text adoptions and changing editions of existing textbooks isn’t practical. The library’s book collection is intended to supplement and enhance the information contained in texts and taught in class.

What the library can do, though, is provide house and manage reserve copies of textbooks that instructors have supplied. Students can borrow these books on short-term loan (usually 2 hours) to permit access to as many as possible. They can study and make photocopies from them in the library, but texts are for in-library use only and students need their current college ID to use them.

Calling all LBCC Faculty!

The library’s reserve service depends upon faculty to supply copies of their textbooks and to make them available for reserve checkout. Often this is a student’s only avenue for completing the reading assignments for his/her course. Faculty owned reserve textbooks can be put on reserve by completing a form found at http://lib.lbcc.edu/forms/reserveform.cfm

For further information contact: Nenita Buenaventura at nbuenaventura@lbcc.edu.

Library Update #56

Information Literacy: Today, Student Success Depends on It!

Today’s society is driven by technology and information, challenging our students to become information literate, skilled at identifying, retrieving, evaluating, and synthesizing recorded knowledge in multiple formats and from many sources.

LBBC’s library and its library faculty are dedicated to equipping the campus community with these kinds of skills through

• carefully selected print and virtual information resources
• orientations geared to the needs of particular courses and assignments
• a curriculum of courses designed to nurture and develop information competence.

Library Department Head Kim Barclay would like to tell you more:

She, and other LBCC Library faculty, would welcome the opportunity to talk about these initiatives and respond to questions at meetings of the academic departments. And librarians always are available to present orientations and in-depth seminars for class groups; these sessions are most effective when they are done at “point of need,” when they are related directly to an assignment that the class has been given.

An online form for scheduling an orientation is available at: http://lib.lbcc.edu/services/facserv.html#forms. The library’s course curriculum can be found at: http://lib.lbcc.edu/classes/classes.html

For more information contact: Kim Barclay kbarclay@lbcc.edu.

Library Update #55

Library Looks Ahead to 08/09

As the 2007/08 Academic Year draws to a close the LAC Library celebrates an anniversary; it’s now one year since the library relocated many of its collections to off-site storage, moved to its current temporary site in the basement of the E Building, and since construction began on the renovation of library, Building L. It’s obvious to all at LAC that construction is progressing and that the improvements will be significant, for example:

* An expanded building “footprint” that will extend the walls on the north side

* Elimination of confining and confusing multi-floor book stacks so that library collections can be configured for easy access on the first floor

* Better facilities for library skills instruction and access to the library’s growing collection of web-based books and databases


But Building L won’t be ready for the library and its other tenants to reoccupy before 2009; current plans are for the renovation to be complete by the start of the Spring, 2009 semester. In the meantime the library will continue to operate out of the E-Building and Trailer TU at LAC, where its temporary facilities include a small collection of print books, journals and reference books (recently augmented with new titles), as well as access to thousands of e-books, e-journals, image files, and other information resources.

PCC students, staff, and faculty, however, can look forward to more immediate improvements in their library and information services as the PCC Library prepares to occupy a new building this summer. By the fall the library at PCC will move from Building GG to a new facility that will provide students with updated technology, media services and an expanded modern learning resource facility. The PCC Library Learning Resource Center will feature open computer access and multimedia areas for reference, instruction, study, and self-paced education.

The PCC Library will continue to maintain all of the materials in support of the Child Development program including children's materials. In addition, an area has been planned where the youngest students in the Child Development Center can come to look at books and have books read to them.


For more information contact: Kim Barclay, kbarclay@lbcc.edu

Library Update #54

Powerful Tools for Literary Criticism, Interpretation and Biography: The Literature Resource Center online

Through its subscription to The Literature Resource Center, LBCC Library is proud to offer students and faculty the world’s most current, comprehensive and reliable online literature database. The Literature Resource Center offers the campus community the broadest and most representative range of authors and critical views and providing more substantive biographies and full-text literature criticism than any other resource

The Literature Resource Center provides:

* Biographical entries on more than 130,000 authors — from antiquity to the present – from Gale literature sources, providing detailed biographical, bibliographical and contextual information about authors’ lives and works

* More than 70,000 selected full-text critical essays and reviews by a wide range of critics

* More than 650,000 articles from more than 300 scholarly journals and literary magazines

* More than 7,000 overviews of frequently studied works taken from Gale literature sources

* Nearly 3,000 author portraits

* Active links to nearly 5,000 selected Web sites

* Merriam-Webster’s® Encyclopedia of Literature, featuring 10,000 definitions of literary terms

Test drive The Literature Resource Center at the LBCC Library web site : click on the “articles and databases” tab on the left side of the screen, then select Literature Resource Center from the list of databases.


For more information contact: Nenita Buenaventura, Access Services Librarian at nbuenaventura@lbcc.edu

Library Update #53

LBCC Faculty and Staff, Borrow Books and Media at CSULB Library!

Live near CSULB? Need a book, CD, or DVD you can’t locate at LBCC or your local public library? Don’t have the time to get the book you need through Interlibrary Loan? You should know that for the past several years LBCC Library and CSULB have had a partnership agreement in effect. What does this mean for you and your students?


* You can use and borrow books and media from CSULB Library (a collection of over 1.4 million items) as though you were a student, faculty, or staff at that campus

* Loan periods are:
o Books, 120 days for faculty and staff, 3 weeks for students
o Media (CD’s, DVD’s, Videos) , 7 days for faculty, staff, and students

* Not included are items on reserve and periodicals; library computers and databases are restricted to one hour use per 24 hour period and require separate registration

* It is the borrower’s responsibility to return books and media to CSULB — there’s no courier service between campuses



For more information contact: Nenita Buenaventura, Access Services Librarian at nbuenaventura@lbcc.edu.

Library Update #52

Chat With a Librarian 24/7: How Can They Do That?

Working late on a term paper? Need to verify something from your class notes? An image or graph to add some visual interest to your report? Now LBCC students can connect with a librarian any time, day or night to find help with these and other questions. Just go to the library web site, click on “Ask a Librarian” on the right side of the screen, scroll down to “Virtual Chat” and click. (But before you do, notice the four other ways you can reach a librarian for the help you need.)

As devoted as they are to supporting students and faculty with their research needs, LBCC librarians haven’t established a call center, and they aren’t taking questions at home in their pajamas to maintain this 24/7 reference service. A nationwide consortium of librarians from different time zones, including librarians at LBCC and CSULB, takes the calls and provides the advice and assistance. Though the librarian may be thousands of miles away, he or she can connect to the LBCC’s library home page and use our online catalog and databases to retrieve the information that’s requested. This is another example of how today’s libraries and librarians have taken the initiative to become interconnected and interdependent to serve students better.


For more information contact: Eleanor Sonido at esonido@lbcc.edu.

Library Update #51

Library’s Art Museum Image Gallery Brings A Visual Treasury to the Desktop

A rich digital resource of over 155,000 rights-cleared images gathered from the collections of distinguished museums around the world now is available to the LBCC campus community from any web-enabled workstation. Through the library’s subscription to the Art Museum Image Gallery students and faculty can view, download, and integrate into papers and projects the visual masterpieces of ancient civilizations, American, European, and Medieval history, as well as world religions and music. Full bibliographic records accompany every image, and users can search the gallery by keyword, subject, artist, title of work, type of object, and culture/nationality.

To test drive this extraordinary database just visit the library home page, click on “articles and databases” on the right side of the screen, and select “Art Museum Image Gallery” (When working from an off-campus computer be sure to click the “Off Campus” button to authenticate yourself as a currently enrolled or employed LBCC user.)


For more information contact Nenita Buenaventura, Access Services Librarian nbuenaventura@lbcc.edu

Library Update #50