Director's Introduction
The 2019-20 fiscal year saw two monumental changes for the operations of the College Libraries.
First, in early 2020 the Libraries underwent a significant change in organizational structure, eliminating two full-time professional level (managerial) positions in favor of adding a full-time faculty position (see current organizational chart below). This has led to a shift in the oversight of library operations: the library faculty and the professional online services librarian now have joint oversight of the work related to the areas of instruction, reference, assessment, collection development, and outreach through multiple collaborative teams, while other areas of library operations (circulation, resource management, space management, budget management) are largely handled collaboratively by the director and career services staff.
Of course, the second significant change this past year was the COVID-19 pandemic. The library faculty and staff of the Seminole State College Libraries rose amazingly to the challenge in mid-to-late March by swiftly migrating to a completely new “Virtual Mode.” Within a week a public-facing online resource guide had been created to instruct students and faculty on how to access continuing library services and resources virtually, and also how to access new online services and resources, including:
- 24/7 access to chat with a professional librarian
- A new method to set up virtual appointments with library faculty
- New e-magazine and e-audiobook collections
- New e-resources to support research in Biology, Legal Studies, and Literature
The exciting aspect of adding these new services and resources is that they are beneficial in the long-term, and we are planning to retain all of them beyond the pandemic, when more on-campus courses resume.
The data that is presented in this guide reflects the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and many traditional metrics show declining numbers due to the fact that they are anchored to on-campus library usage. Indeed, there is much work to do – for both the library faculty and the administrative staff -- to develop new metrics that capture the use and impact of library services and resources in a (largely) virtual higher education environment. Still, hopefully the data presented in this guide will help to provide a fairly good telling of the state of the College Libraries in 2019-20.
-- Morgan Tracy, Director, College Libraries
Organizational Chart
Key: Green - Faculty; Blue - Career Service; Orange - Student Worker; Purple - Professional
