I have been in communication with Ms. Carol Ann Moon, the Reference and instructional outreach librarian at St. Leo University (SLU) in St. Leo (Pasco County), FL. She has masters' degrees in German from UF and LIS from USF. St. Leo University is a small, private, Catholic university. The mission of the library mimics that of the University maintaining all academic support of the students. Th SLU mission reads "To accomplish its mission, the university community creates a student-centered environment in which love of learning is of prime importance. Members of the community are expected to examine and express their own values, listen respectfully to and respond to the opinions of others, serve the community in which they live, welcome others into their lives and care for all of God's creations."
The main clientele of the small academic library are SLU students and the local community. An open wireless network is available, as are about 20 open-use computers for research, web access, and other computer applications.
Some of the most common requests are directional as the patrons do not know where to find the catalog and many are timid about its locations online. The catalog is available from main SLU page and from their academic portal. The main question is usually "how do I search?" This reveals to Ms. Moon that the students are not spending time reviewing the university resources online because they are not familiar with school or library websites. The library is conducting a survey of information about library usage now for the first time in a decade. The library orientation currently is given to students on a CD during their orientation in their packets. This means there is no way to track the usage of training materials by the library.
As far as preservation goes, student newspapers were digitized by contractor recently and are available on library website archives.
Librarians are considered faculty at SLU and, hence, are required to do instructional work for their portfolio and for tenure. She has been teaching German, faculty development, and some one-on-one library instruction. She finds the faculty development program amazingly rewarding. This program is offered to faculty and adjuncts. It encourages them to add electronic resources to course curriculum and assignments, to teach students how to use the online resources, and serve to impart on students the importance of the electronic and academic resources. The faculty development modules are especially valuable for teaching adjuncts about what resources are actually available through SLU and giving instructors and professors opportunity to communicate across disciplines and campuses.
Ms. Moon finds the special events and library event planning the most satisfying thing about her work as it brings in poets, authors, etc. and creates an entertainment where the library is a LIVING space- opening library to not just multifaceted uses by the SLU community.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, Ms. Moon finds inconsistency to be the most challenging aspect of librarianship. Days are different and totally vary because every patron comes in with a different question. The most challenging aspect is guaranteeing and providing service at the same level to patron by all library professionals and paraprofessionals. Service ethic can vary between each individual. The reputation of good service can be undone by just a few negative interactions because it is such a fragile intangible asset. Ms. Moon believes a way to improve these aspects is for staff leadership to create some tools for introspection on weekly performance and self-assessment of performance, and to help librarians ensure dynamics remain strong to guarantee service quality.
St. Leo has a high level of public access electronic resources. Two reference librarians are available away from campus, all the catalog resources, and almost half of the library's collection are available online. There are two librarians on Facebook as individuals combining their personal pages with those announcements for the Library. They incorporate posting SLU on-goings because when they started, non-individuals could not be a FB entity. None are on Twitter, but one librarian has a library blog.
The SLU Cannon Memorial Library has a number public service staff: there are 3 in circulation who are support personnel, one ILL support person, the library director, support personnel and two librarians in technical services, 8 on-campus 2 off-campus reference librarians, plus one volunteer professional librarian. Ms. Moon sees a trend where more MLIS students are applying for non-professional jobs because there is a shortage in the field.
According to Ms. Moon, SLU is following the trend when it comes to acquisitions: the collection now contains almost 100K e-books, making the electronic book collection even with print resources. One of the activities the library will be engaging in shortly will be a weeding of collections including e-books. The library will evaluate them according to currency. Titles that imply currency/status of reference that are not recently dated will probably be eliminated.
One of the main requests is by faculty who are still really interested in DVD’s for inclusion in their curriculum. They are moving towards YouTube and other free live-stream but not all academic quality materials are available in that format. To complicate matters, sometimes the faculty are aware of a video resource and may have entered it into the curriculum before it has been acquired. Resources for College Libraries was consulted recently, and the SLU library bought everything that the faculty wanted from print collection. Print is one budget category, e-books are in separate account.
Ms. Moon did express a concern for the fate of collections as times are uncertain. There have been implications of university administration perspective that physical brick-and-mortar libraries are on the way out. Librarians at SLU have been asked to provide information showing that collections and the physical structure of the library are being used. It is easier to track the e-book usage, but the print collection and journals which are also mostly print, are not as easily tracked. The ebook collections usage data is stronger than that of the library and print collection- the proverbial stamps (still using the stamps in due dates) are the only way to see if and how a print source is being checked out. When she was employed by UCF Library, they used to use a stroke count for journals being used/needing to be re-shelved. The main question is: HOW DO YOU DEMONSTRATE THAT PRINT IS CRUCIAL IF NUMBERS ARE NOT ATTAINABLE? How do you get to the heart of how collections are being used?
Biology is one of strongest majors, but journal collections/databases is not as strong as it could be. SLU is trying to get JSTOR/SCIENCE DIRECT. The school is in consortium with ICOF (Independent Colleges of Florida- 29 not for profit educational institutions accredited by SACS). Through this consortium SLU can get some databases. They are also a part of LYRASIS another regional consortium, their source for Net Library/EBSCO Host.
Ms. Moon and I spoke a bit about professionalism. When she was at UCF, as paraprofessional, the policy was that if you were a paraprofessional who received a MLIS you had to leave to get a professional job (faculty line) elsewhere. UCF would not hire a paraprofessional who already worked there by transferring them from a paraprofessional line into a professional faculty line. Here at SLU it is not the policy. She would advocate a policy similar to UCF's if she could. Having been at SLU for ten years she has grown to a level that she would not have had she not moved on from UCF. At SLU she is one of the more senior faculty at the library, and has developed confidence and competency through trial by fire. Because of the environment at SLU, Ms. Moon feels she has grown and taken leadership/ownership of more than she expected and more than what would have been available to her at other istitutions.
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