Behind the Scenes at the Library
Summer 2014
The Journey of a Book: Behind the Scenes at the Library
Alison Wang
June 2014
When you visit the Max R. Traurig Library, you usually see library staff at the circulation desk and reference librarians at the reference desk. What you are less likely to see are all those library employees who move a book along from the time it’s requested by a faculty member or a librarian to the time it’s borrowed by a library user. These are the employees who select, order, catalog, and process thousands of library items added to the library’s collection each year.
First stop on a tour of this labyrinth of activity is the library’s technical services office located at S400. All the librarians are responsible for suggesting titles to buy and, of course, we listen to the recommendations of our faculty and students. Knowing the college curriculum helps librarians’ select related books.
Each librarian is focusing on one or more academic subject areas. Books are selected and put into purchase carts through the collection development software Title Source III. These carts are assigned by purchase number and EDI code ready for purchases.
The next step is to order books electronically by sending book information to the library vendor. After the orders are sent, purchase reports are generated. The reports tell the technical services library staff each book’s status: ordered, backordered, cancelled, ordered directly from a publisher, etc. At this time, though we don’t see each book physically, all available book bibliographic data, such as title, author, publication date, edition … are imported to the library database, Voyager Integrated Library System (ILS).
The technical services staff is busy importing ordered data to the system while at the same time checking with the national library database OCLC to verify that the acquisition data meets the library standard data. The in-house purchase orders are created so that the library administrator is able to monitor the materials budget usage.
It may take up to three weeks for new books to arrive. The new books are usually shipped to the technical services office. By opening boxes, checking in each book title, generating invoices, sending the invoices to the college business office, the library staff is now working with the books physically.
These new books are not ready for our users to check out yet. New books will be processed and assigned with Library of Congress call numbers. Each book is labeled with Naugatuck Valley Community College property tags and new book jackets if necessary.
After the processing and cataloging, these new books are now ready to meet our users. The technical services staff sends new books to library. New books are either displayed or shelved in the stacks according its shelf number. At the same time, new book information is available in the library database for students and faculty to access. Now it’s up to the patron, by checking out a book, to complete the journey.
In our library, we have books, DVDs, music CDs, electronic databases, eBooks, etc. Each of library item type has its own journey and has its own story behind the scenes at the library.
From the Children’s Corner
Gretchen Gallagher
Are you an ECE student? Are you a parent of young children?
Did you know that we have a children’s area in the library?
On the library’s 4th floor, tucked in a corner near the study rooms, sits a bright and comfortable spot surrounded by children’s books, CDs, and DVDs.
We’ve gotten some great children’s books in the library this spring! To add to our growing collection of books loved by children, parents, teachers, and librarians, some of the books we’ve ordered are by two of the most popular author/illustrators in children’s literature: Eric Carle and Mo Willems.
Eric Carle has written books that are considered modern classics because of their content and distinctive art work. Basically, he paints large pieces of paper and when dry, uses the collage technique to create colorful, enticing illustrations. His books are wonderful to read during story time to a large group of children or during a bedtime reading ritual to only one or two children. This page from The Very Hungry Caterpillar is an excellent example of the collage technique used by Eric Carle.
If you’ve ever helped a young child learn to read, you may have endured early readers that are loaded with sight-words but have no discernable plot and are less than interesting. Enter Elephant and Piggie, created by children’s book author/illustrator Mo Willems. Elephant and Piggie are best friends who share ice cream and toys (sometimes), who play catch with their friend Snake (who has no arms), and who go to great lengths to cheer each other up (when necessary). The illustrations and text of the stories may appear simple, but the way that Mo Willems teases emotion and hilarity from such humble words and drawings is nothing short of miraculous. Parents and teachers everywhere rejoice! Using the Elephant and Piggie books to help children learn to read is a genuine pleasure for kids and the parents/teachers/librarians who love them.
From Can I Play, Too? by Mo Willems:
What will happen next to Elephant, Piggie, and Snake? Pop over to the library’s children’s area and check out more books by Mo Willems, Eric Carle, and other fantastic authors and illustrators.
Library Book Group
Elaine Milnor
The library will continue its “Book Group” series of brown-bag lunch time discussions for NVCC faculty and staff this summer. The series is organized and facilitated by Elaine Milnor of the library staff, and meetings take place during semester breaks. The book selections are blessedly short, prize-winning works of fiction and non-fiction, whose authors offer a glimpse into a range of cultures, life experiences and periods in history.
The summer book selection is Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. This classic work is described by Amazon.com as follows: “One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century; Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.”
All faculty and staff are invited (through campus mail) to join in. There is no formal group membership, but the series certainly has its cadre of devoted participants from across the campus, who never fails to enjoy the lively and collegial discussions. Get to know your colleagues better, consider joining us for future gatherings! For additional information, contact emilnor@nv.edu.
Who: You and other fabulous folks.
What:
When: June 18, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Where: Library, L410 (serving coffee and dessert; brown-bag lunch).
How: Copies on order – RSVP to reserve yours (256 pages).
From the National Endowment For the Arts “The Big Read” website:
To call Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God an "African American feminist classic" may be an accurate statement … but it is a misleadingly narrow and rather dull way to introduce a vibrant and achingly human novel. The syncopated beauty of Hurston's prose, her remarkable gift for comedy, the sheer visceral terror of the book's climax, all transcend any label that critics have tried to put on this remarkable work. First published amid controversy in 1937, then rescued from obscurity four decades later, the novel narrates Janie Crawford's ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny. Although Hurston wrote the novel in only seven weeks, Their Eyes Were Watching God breathes and bleeds a whole life's worth of urgent experience.
http://www.neabigread.org/books/theireyes/readers-guide/
From Amazon.com:
“A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don’t know how to live properly.” —Zadie Smith
(Sent with the approval of Dean Lopez)
Please join us!
Habla usted Inglés?
Jaime Hammond
You can now access Mango Languages, a fun and interactive language learning program, through the library! Mango offers 62 foreign language courses from Arabic to Yiddish and Ancient Greek to Latin American Spanish! Another 17 English courses for non-English speakers are also available, as well as specialty courses like Medical Spanish and Irish for St. Patrick’s Day. Many of the language courses also include access to foreign films. You can create an account to keep track of your progress, or choose “Quick Start” to explore. Mango also has an app that is available for iPhone, iPad and Android! Start learning by clicking here, and veľa šťastia (“good luck” in Slovak)!
“I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.”
Charles De Secondat (1689-1755)
P *D*A*
Elizabeth Frechette
In library language, PDA stands for Patron Driven Acquisition. The Patron is you. The Acquisitions are electronic versions of books that you can read online, free, from the NVCC Library. Driven means you the patron makes the ultimate decision on the library’s purchase of these books.
How does that work? Your curriculum-aware, friendly librarians have selected ebooks in several academic areas. If an ebook is used in any kind of extended way by a patron (you), we purchase it and it becomes part of our regular ebook collection.
A purchase is triggered when a user downloads an ebook, views an ebook for more than 10 minutes, views more than ten pages of an ebook, or prints, emails, or copy & pastes an ebook page.
If no one uses a title we’ve chosen in any of the above ways we can turn it back in at no charge, and choose other titles for you.
Check out our Patron Driven Acquisitions to see what we’ve got!
Contact US:
Max R. Traurig LibraryNaugatuck Valley Community College
Phone: (203)575-8250
eMail: Library@nv.edu
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Email: awang@nv.edu
Website: http://www.nv.edu/Academics/Library
Location: 750 Chase Parkway, Waterbury, CT, United States
Phone: 203-575-8250