Interviewed by Prof. Ian Beilin
IB: Before becoming Department Chair and Library Chief this semester, your title was Information Literacy (IL) and Instruction Librarian. What are some of the things you learned from your experiences in that position that you will apply to your new role?
MS: That’s a great question! The first thing that comes to my mind is flexibility. After spending a number of years out of the classroom before coming to City Tech, my position as IL and Instruction Librarian involved lots of teaching in a variety of contexts: single-session research instruction for English Composition I, advanced workshops for Honors and Emerging Scholars, the library’s three-credit course Research & Documentation for the Information Age, and faculty workshops on scholarly communications and more. My preparation for teaching has definitely improved over the years, and I’ve also learned to be more accommodating of the wide range of unplanned situations that can happen in the classroom, from technology failures to students who haven’t done the reading to questions that fall outside my personal knowledge. Increasing my flexibility has been great preparation for my new role as Chief Librarian, in which I often switch between many different kinds of tasks throughout the day or week.
I’ve also been fortunate to meet many faculty across the college in my role as IL and Instruction Librarian as I coordinated the library’s research and information literacy instruction program. I’m looking forward to ongoing collaborations with City Tech faculty in all disciplines as my library colleagues and I continue to work to support our students’ academic success.
IB: Can you give us a brief sketch of what your ideal City Tech Library might look like?
MS: Much of my scholarly research has involved learning more about how students do their academic work and I enjoyed bringing that experience to the library’s strategic planning committee last Spring as we developed a five-year plan for the library. It’s no secret that the library is bursting at the seams – during many weekdays every seat is filled with studying students, and we even see them sitting on the floors between the book stacks. Of course space is at a premium at City Tech, but we would value any opportunity to expand the library’s physical space for student study and research. An expansion could also allow us to offer dedicated research space for faculty.
In addition to a larger library overall, my ideal City Tech Library would include more space for students to work with technology in ways that support their research and coursework. This could take several different forms: presentation practice rooms with large screens that students could plug their laptops or devices into, laptop or other device loans for students, study areas with modular furniture that could be reconfigured for individual or group work. Plenty of electrical outlets are also a feature of my ideal library – our wired study carrels are the first to fill up with students each day.
IB: What do you foresee as the most immediate changes that the City Tech community can expect to see at the library over the next year?
MS: Some of the biggest changes in the library this year are in personnel. Over the summer we had several library faculty retire: in addition to Prof. Darrow Wood, our previous Chief Librarian, Information Technology Librarian Prof. Songqian Lu also retired. This Fall semester the Library’s Appointments Committee has been very focused on recruiting and hiring new faculty, which will continue into next semester when Coordinator of Reference Prof. Joan Grassano retires. We’re also hiring several new technical and support staff in the library this year.
As part of our efforts to ensure that the library meets students’ needs for academic work, this year we’re also making some small changes to the physical facility. We’ve completed a signage audit and will soon be redesigning all of the library’s signs, and are considering ways to better accommodate individual and group work, and preferences for quiet and silence.
This year Prof. Junior Tidal, our Web Services Librarian, also plans to unveil our redesigned library website. We’re all looking forward to the more user-friendly and mobile device-responsive design of the new site. We’ll also be featuring CUNY’s new discovery service – CUNY OneSearch – more prominently on the site, which makes it easier to search for books and articles in the library’s collections across multiple databases.
IB: What kinds of partnerships and collaborations with faculty and staff outside of the library are you interested in creating and/or nurturing?
MS: There are lots of possibilities for partnerships between library faculty and faculty and staff outside of the library. In our roles as subject specialists library faculty collaborate with faculty in other departments to strengthen collections and research instruction for students in their degree programs, and there are many opportunities to increase those collaborations. Library faculty have expertise in the evolving scholarly communications system, and we are interested in collaborating around issues of open access, publication quality, and open educational resources. As CUNY’s Office of Library Services rolls out the university-wide institutional repository next semester, City Tech library faculty look forward to working with faculty across the college to take advantage of this terrific new resource.
I’m looking forward to continuing to work with my colleagues inside and outside the library in the coming years. Thanks for the opportunity to be interviewed!
