Library Services During a State of Emergency

By Dan Crump, American River College

The ASCCC has worked collaboratively with system partners to put together a series of professional development opportunities (webinars) to address some of the most critical issues facing CCC students and faculty today. to provide the following presentations as a means of supporting faculty in their service to students. The ASCCC approached CCL leadership asking if CCL would be interested in partnering with the ASCCC on how library faculty are adjusting to the state of emergency environment. CCL President Leslie Tirapelle appointed me to work with Stephanie Curry, a librarian at Reedley College and a member of the ASCCC Executive Committee as a North Representative, on developing such a webinar.

We had a short timeline and put together a PowerPoint presentation and went online (Thursday, April 2) to present! We tried to highlight the wonderful efforts of librarians to help students and faculty during this extraordinary occurrence---yes, we have a slide that states “Librarians are Awesome!

Some of the things that we covered:

• Focus on supporting students and faculty and ensuring instructional continuity.</li>

• Library Buildings and Staffing---Totally closed? Partly? Any access?</li>

• Computers (and hotspots) for Students---many libraries were involved with college efforts to check out items to students.</li>

• Online Resources---ebooks and videos that are available in our collections.
• Library Services Platform (LSP)---many librarians lauded the having a cloud-based system that enabled staff to maintain and update services remotely.
• Also comments, such as LSP “includes an infrastructure that supports connected library work in support of a common goal: student success” and “ensuring that the unique population we serve has high quality services even when the physical libraries are closed.
• Orientations---using video sources such as Zoom and YouTube to provide remote orientations for students.
• Canvas---embedding resources (and ourselves) in the course Canvas pages of instructional faculty.
• Databases---the CCL-CCLC Consortium suite of databases and others that we have all purchased.
• Reserve Textbooks---most libraries have print copies of textbooks, utilizing the resources of textbook publishers and provides, such as VitalSource, RedShelf, Cengage, to provide online versions of textbooks.

A recording of the hour-long presentation (plus the PowerPoint) is available at https://cccconfer.zoom.us/rec/play/v5R-Ibj8rD83T4GRtgSDVKAsW9W7fKms2yAZ8_pezki2VCVWOwf1MLpGNOBwfQdeTByZyo_JPH_Yre3x?startTime=1585861000000.

You can also go to the ASCCC website (www.asccc.org), click on Events/Past Events/ASCCC: Governance, Remote Teaching and Discipline Discussions/Program/Thursday, April 2.