Changes at CSULB Library: Good News for LBCC Users

The University Library at CSU Long Beach begins its spring term on Monday, February 26. For nearly a decade a partnership agreement has enabled LBCC students, staff, and faculty to borrow books, DVD’s, audiobooks, and CD’s at CSULB using their current validated College ID card.

Database Use Requires a Guest Pass
Until now to use any of the more than 160 subscription databases that CSULB Library subscribes to (including PsycInfo, Lexis Nexis Academic, Factiva, MLA Bibliography, and JSTOR) members of the LBCC community (students, staff and faculty) have had to apply at the reception desk for a “computer guest pass” and their library database access was limited to just one hour in each 24 hour period.

Guest Pass Time Limit Extended
Guests now can make better use of their time at CSULB Library because database access time has just increased to 90 minutes. Although CSULB library has more than 200 workstations for public use in the library’s new Spidell Technology Center, there is tremendous demand for access from CSULB students (who are allocated four hours of computing time per session); that’s the reason for the limits on use by visitors. “We know that it takes a student time to become familiar with a new database before he or she can start finding and retrieving needed information, said Roman Kochan, Dean of Library Services at CSULB. “By increasing the guest pass time by 50% we hope to make database use a little less stressful for our visiting scholars.”

The Library’s Open Earlier on Weekdays
Also new at CSULB Library is an increase in building hours. The library now will open at 7 a.m. (instead of 7:45) Monday through Friday. For a complete schedule of hours for the spring term see http://www.csulb.edu/library/guide/hours/

For more information contact: Henry DuBois hdubois@lbcc.edu

Library Update #60

Coming Soon: LAC Library Early Closure & Reopening

The long wait is almost over. The extensive renovation and repurposing of the Building L, the LAC campus Library and Learning Resources complex is reaching completion. In anticipation of this welcome event, the library would like to alert the campus community to the following target dates:

• The LAC Library, currently located in the E-Building (Lower Level) will close for the semester after Saturday, December 13; note that this date is before the end of the fall semester

• Library services at the PCC campus will continue to be available to both LAC and PCC customers regular hours through December 19

• Collections and services will be moved to Building L between December 15-January 9; LAC Library will be closed to the public for this period

• The library’s reopening in the remodeled Building L will coincide with the beginning of the Spring, 2009 semester on Monday, January 12

For more information contact: Dena Laney dlaney@lbcc.edu

Library Update #59

New Building, New Era for PCC Students and Faculty

On September 17 a ceremony that heralded the opening of the new Library and Learning Resource Center at the Pacific Coast Campus made front page news in the Long Beach Press Telegram.

President Eloy Oakley characterized the event as representing “a new beginning for this campus and this college and this community.”

As all of us in the LBCC community take pride in the accolades being showered upon this achievement, let’s consider what the creation of “a true gem of a library” will mean for PCC:

* A huge improvement in the library’s “functionality:”
o Areas for quiet study and collaborative group study
o Better, more logical “flow” between service desks, shelved collections, study areas, and computing facilities
o Improved heating and cooling, attractive new furnishings and flooring

* Study rooms equipped for network connectivity

* A tenfold increase in computer workstations available to support student research in a new Research Center

* Helpful, attentive support staff at service desks and providing technical assistance to Research Center users

* Expert librarian help with identifying, selecting, evaluating, and synthesizing information contained in library print and online resources

* A dramatic new “smart classroom” with tiered seating, hands-on pc access at each seat, and wall-size flat panel presentation screens

For more information contact: Dena Laney, Systems Librarian dlaney@lbcc.edu

Library Update #57

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