While You Were Out

In January, when most Bentley students are enjoying some hard-earned time off away from campus, the library is a busy place. For many members of our staff, January is a time to catch up on projects that end up on the back burner during the fall. It’s also a period of intense, focused activity as we prepare for the start of the spring semester. I asked the library staff to share how they spent their time in January to give you an idea of what we do to keep the library humming along day in and day out all year round. Here are some of the things they did.

• Various members of the staff interviewed candidates for three open positions in the library, including two full-time circulation jobs.
• The Technical Services department purchased, received, and processed 654 new titles for the collection.
• Technical Services also added 610 new titles to the Books 24x7 electronic books collection and 926 new titles to the electronic collection of government documents.
• The circulation department (aka Library Services) changed the overdue fines for popular DVDs from $4 per day to $1 per day. Circulation staff put new labels on the DVD cases to reflect the change (that’s a lot of scraping and sticking, folks).
• Reference librarians assigned to sections of GB301 for the spring semester got research guides together for their classes.
• Those new titles mentioned above? Many of them were ordered by Reference staff doing collection development work to expand and update the library’s holdings in specific areas.
• Another aspect of collection development is looking at items in the library’s collection that haven’t been used in a long time and deciding whether to keep them. One librarian is focusing on the popular fiction collection, moving out older titles that haven’t circulated in many years—sometimes since before most members of the current freshman class were born—to make room for new fiction.
• The research and instruction coordinator worked with professors to schedule library instruction sessions for spring semester classes and planned a study about current student research habits so that the library can serve you better in your research.
• Interlibrary Loan lent and received books from libraries in the United States, Canada, China, and Italy (and that’s in a quiet month for ILL).

That’s not everything, of course—just what our busy staff could remember and chose to share. Librarians don’t have a catchy slogan or anything to explain to you what our work is about, but if you visit the library regularly, you see it in action around you. If you’re curious about anything we do here, drop us a line.