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Cuyamaca College Library

Outlook - Current Issue

Letter from the President

Headshot of Alison Gurganus, CCL President By Alison Gurganus, San Diego Mesa College & CCL President

Welcome to the 2024-2025 academic year! As this new year begins we are seeing a number of positive changes here at CCL. As you know we have spent a number of years giving a great deal of our focus to the Library Services Platform (LSP) and making sure that we have strong leadership and support to keep it running successfully.

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Reports

We asked for your evaluation in spring 2024, we got it. People from 63 colleges across California community colleges sent in thoughtful, encouraging, and useful feedback about this program and the 2024-2025 iteration will be even better because of you.

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Ah, October – the signs and scents of Fall, Halloween decorations, and the arrival of the FY2024-25 CCL membership invoices. What does your college get from that $150 CCL membership payment?  (Which, by the way, hasn’t changed for many years!) 

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The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) held its Spring Plenary Session in April at the Marriott Hotel in San Jose. The theme of Session was “Radicalizing Spaces of Possibility: Faculty Leadership in Vision 2030.” As ASCCC President Cheryl Aschenbach noted in her February President’s Update, “The future of teaching, learning, and leading must be focused in practices that challenge Eurocentric structures and elevate liberation.

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The ELUNA 2024 Annual Meeting was the first professional conference I attended. As a classified library employee, I do not get many opportunities to attend events on this scale. I had planned to attend the ELUNA 2020 Annual Meeting as part of the Alma/Primo implementation team at my library and was disappointed when the in-person meeting was cancelled. 

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I began by attending Developers Day+, a series of single-track sessions delivered over two days focusing on integrations, APIs, and so on. Attendees and presenters included everyone from the tech-curious to full-blown software engineers, with presentations ranging from birds-eye theoretical (how do we control for bias in development work?) to exploratory (can ChatGPT write normalization rules? Short answer: no) to the “wait, what—how are you doing that” (a demo on how to intercept Primo code at a base level and redirect it to third-party services—never mind!).

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Drawing upon my former experience in the LSP Electronic Resource Management Work Group, and my current experiences in the CCL Electronic Access and Resources Committee, I look for the overlap between the technical aspects of Alma/Primo and the collection decisions we make in our libraries. 

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Thanks to the generous funding from CCL, I was able to attend the ELUNA Annual Meeting for the first time in Minneapolis last May. It was a 3-day event packed with numerous sessions presented by Ex Libris users and vendors. It was an excellent opportunity to see how other libraries are using various Ex Libris products to meet the needs of their community, but also to hear about successes, strategies, pitfalls and how these institutions make changes or improve their processes.

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Once again, I was able to attend ELUNA Annual Conference due to the generosity of the CCL Executive Board. Having been selected to attend last year’s I did not think that I would have the opportunity this year. When I learned that my attendance was approved, I was very pleased and began my planning.

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Attending the ELUNA conference for the first time was an invaluable experience. As a space that brings together professionals utilizing Ex Libris' library management system, ELUNA offers a unique opportunity to stay abreast of the latest developments in library technology. From new product releases to changes in the system itself, ELUNA provides a platform for library professionals to learn about what's on the horizon.

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Hello all, Welcome to the inaugural LSP Newsletter! Here, I hope to be able to provide folks with more information about the Library Services Platform and the goings on with the program–especially for those who may not be serving on a Work Group or keeping up with the Governance Committee Minutes. Read more …
Since our last report, the CCL Electronic Access and Resources committee shared two new reviews: Read more …

Announcements

Congratulations to those who have won awards in the last year!

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The Mt. SAC Library is thrilled to announce that we have received a prestigious grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a 3-year project titled "Promoting Equity by Examining College History Through Digital Photos."

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The San Diego Mesa College Library and Learning Resource Center (LRC) received the 2024 Library Excellence in Access and Diversity (LEAD) Award from Insight Into Diversity magazine, the largest and oldest diversity and inclusion publication in higher education. The LEAD Award honors academic libraries’ programs and initiatives that encourage and support DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) across their campus. 

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Congratulations to our newly retired library faculty!

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Congratulations to our newly tenured library faculty!

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Staffing

Congratulations to our newly hired library employees!

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Norco College welcomes Cheryl Cox as our new Instructional Design Librarian effective Fall Semester 2024. Cheryl served as Library Associate Faculty and as the Library Technical Assistant II at Norco College since 2021.

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The Wilfred J. Airey Library at Norco College welcomes two new Library Technical Assistants

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To support students enrolled in Cerro Coso’s new Child Development Associate Teacher Certificate of Achievement being offered fully in Spanish, the library hired 2 part-time bilingual librarians to develop a comprehensive suite of library services in Spanish.

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Articles of Interest

In Spring 2024, I was able to take a sabbatical to create six Canvas modules using primary source materials. The modules focus on local history and use sources that reflect our student population and status as an HSI. I collaborated with Tanya Hollis, Director of the Labor Archives Research Center at San Francisco State University to build modules we can each use at our institutions and share with others through Canvas Commons

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Norco College recently completed its own graphic novel titled, On the Research Trail: A Guide to Evaluating Information. Norco College librarians applied for and received a Century Circle grant from the RCCD Foundation to develop an inclusive 24-page library comic for students on how to critically evaluate the trustworthiness of information and identify misinformation and disinformation online. 

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Events