Chat with a Librarian
During the pandemic my library experimented with online reference chat. While it was nice to offer this for students, with our limited staff we ran into issues keeping regular chat hours, which in turn led to low usage. Because of all this we ended up discontinuing our chat service as classes returned to campus and we returned to the library. We had given up on the idea of a chat service when we were approached about joining the Power Library service Chat with a Librarian. Chat with a Librarian is maintained by Power Library and HSLC, it brings librarians from different institutions together to collectively staff their chat service 24 hours a day. Each library must commit to providing a set number of hours each week that their staff will answer questions on chat. This lets you provide significant hours of chat coverage to your students without have to be on chat constantly. As part of this you may have to help patrons at other institutions and librarians at other institutions may help your students. This is made possible by each library filling out detailed documentation about their library that other librarians can reference to enable them to help patrons. Chat with a Librarian integrates into your website using a simple popup icon similar to most chat software. My library is rolling this service out to our students this Spring and I’m hopeful the increased coverage will lead to great usage by students. If you are interested in Chat with a Librarian you can get more details here.
Stress Relief for All
The end of the fall term is always a stressful time in my library, as students hustle to get in their final papers and projects on time. Staff is also a bit frazzled by this time of the year, as well. While our public printer on the first floor is the most used on campus, it’s surely showing its age and routinely breaks down at the most inopportune times. By December, everyone on campus is ready for winter break, battling against time to wrap up finals, papers, and projects.
Earlier this semester, a group of volunteers with Canine Partners for Life brought several dogs in their service training program to campus to offer some socialization opportunities. These dogs currently live with inmates who participate in the training program at two nearby prisons and will go on to receive further training to complete their service dog certification. The volunteers take the dogs out regularly to expose them to real-life situations and scenarios, including them on doctor’s visits, shopping trips, eating at restaurants, and other similar ventures out in the community. When the dogs visited the library, they got to enjoy interacting with new people and places, and also offered some much-appreciated cuddles to the students, and staff as well. It was a win-win for everyone!
Their visit to the library in October was so well attended that it made sense to schedule the group back in December, just before Finals Week. I shared the December visit on social media and through posters on campus, and to my surprise, students started arriving about ten minutes before the dogs were even scheduled to arrive! After planning programs earlier in the term that had not garnered much interest on campus, it was nice to see students in the library who rarely, if ever visit. If dogs can initially get them into the library, maybe the next time they need research help, they will come back for assistance. At any rate, both therapy dog events this semester were successful for all involved and we hope to continue this program next term.
Has your library had success with therapy dogs or other stress relief programs? We also put out puzzles, coloring sheets, squishy animal toys and mini-Rubic cubes, and other creative outlets for students around finals. Sometimes students just need a break. Hopefully, they realize the library is not just a great place to study, but also a place to relax as well.
The HistoryMakers: The Digital Repository for the Black Experience
For many Americans at this time of year their attention turns to football, but how many people take the time to consider the enormous contribution African Americans have made to the sport? Is anyone documenting the central place of African-American athletes in a pastime that looms so large in the national consciousness? Well, earlier this year the National Football League and NFL Films announced a partnership with The HistoryMakers.
As Julieanna L. Richardson, Founder & President of The HistoryMakers said at the announcement of the collaboration, “Our goal since our inception has always been to document the African-American experience across a variety of disciplines and this commitment will ensure that the stories of African American football legends and African-Americans who have played a critical role in NFL history will now become part of this nation’s patrimony.”
In fact, in addition to SportsMakers there are several other distinct subject categories, such as CivicMakers, BusinessMakers, ArtMakers, and ScienceMakers, who’s oral histories have been recorded by The HistoryMakers.
The HistoryMakers is a nonprofit educational institution, founded In 2000. It has collected the largest collection of African American video oral histories. It provides a robust primary source research database, with a rich dataset for Digital Scholarship exploration and experimentation.
Prior to The HistoryMakers, there was only one other large-scale, methodic attempt to document African American history in the first-person – the WPA Slave Narratives. Now, The HistoryMakers has carried this tradition from the 20th century forward to the 21st century, joining the stories of the enslaved with the stories of their descendants permanently at the Library of Congress.
Projecting Storage Facility Capacity
Even storage facilities fill up eventually. Part of my work this past year has been to figure out the capacity of our storage facility here at Pitt. We have two high bays, one which is at capacity at just under 3 million volumes, and the other with plenty of growth space. As the research collections coordinator, it’s my responsibility to keep tabs on how we’re using this space, because it is very unlikely we will be able to build another facility when this one is full.
Here, the best practices of shelf space planning go out the window, because we’re not just working in linear feet with a general average of 1” per book. Suddenly we’re working in three dimensions, taking into consideration the varying densities shelves of different sized books can have and keeping in mind there’s no surefire or easy way to figure out what’s coming into storage down the line. Because high density storage is concerned with height and width and depth of books in order to use our shelf space in the most efficient way possible, that’s three aspects of a book that we would have to know in advance.
To make things easy, there are five standard sizes of trays: A, B, C, D, and E, and each book’s size is determined by its width across the front. Our facility also keeps books of similar height together, so we might have a B tray for books 9” high and another B tray for books 10” high. Each shelf only gets one type of tray size/height. My colleagues and I attempted once to figure out whether there was any correlation between the measurement of a book in our catalog and the size tray it went in. There was not. The best I can do with the information we have access to is to figure out the distribution of tray sizes we’ve used in the past and use that to make an educated guess about what we will receive in the future.
I went about collecting data about our collection, such as the average density of each tray size, aided greatly by the reporting capabilities of CaiaSoft, our inventory management software. I am perfecting a formula to figure out how many more books our facility can hold if our collection throughout the other libraries is similar to that of what’s already here. I could further refine this educated guess by learning more about the collections that are not in storage yet. For example, if we no longer have any oversize material in our other libraries, and have no plans to purchase any more (especially if we have an e-preferred policy), then I would not have to take oversize materials into consideration in my formula.
It is an interesting project that I’m excited to be working on, and one that will help me greatly in the future when making decisions about what we accession into our storage facility.
I hope everyone has a happy new year!
Latest Issue of Pennsylvania Libraries: Research & Practice
The latest issue of Pennsylvania Libraries: Research & Practice is now available at palrap.org
Articles include:
- In the PaLRaP Spotlight: Susan Banks, MLIS
- Format Agnostic Archival Processing: Using One Standard for All
- An Introduction to Pennsylvania Legal Research for Academic Librarians and Researchers
- Experiential Learning in the Archives: Case Studies in Digital Humanities Pedagogy for Undergraduate Research
- Noteworthy: News Briefs from PA Libraries
Bryan McGeary & Danielle Skaggs, Co-Editors
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Pennsylvania Libraries: Research & Practice (PaLRaP) is a peer-reviewed, open access journal, sponsored by the College and Research Division of the Pennsylvania Library Association. PaLRaP provides an opportunity for librarians in Pennsylvania to share their knowledge and experience with practicing librarians across Pennsylvania and beyond. The journal includes articles from all areas of librarianship, and from all types of libraries within Pennsylvania.
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