In order to use e-resources off campus, you must have your library barcode (found on your City Tech ID) activated at the library’s Circulation (Borrow and Return) desk. When on campus, most e-resources are accessed automatically. When off-campus, login with your City Tech library barcode found on the lower left of your City Tech ID labeled LIB. All City Tech library barcodes begin with the prefix of 22477. Enter all the numbers without spaces.
The following e-resources require creating an account with a login using your City Tech email:
Note that the New York Times and Wall Street Journals have apps for phones and tablets. Apps are also available for some products, such as EBSCO.
If a database is listed as fulltext, this does not mean that the entire contents is in full text. Click Find it at CUNY to see if we have access to the article in another database. If fulltext is not available, consider using interlibrary loan.
Ebooks are varied in terms of options for download. For example, an Adobe Digital Editions account is required to borrow Ebook Central Ebook Central titles electronically. Other vendors allow downloading of books and book chapters as PDFs. Most textbooks are not available as e-books.
Did you know that you can connect our e-resources to Google Scholar? This is extremely handy for more advanced student researchers and for faculty. Interested in learning more about how to maximize City Tech’s e-resources for your research? If you are faculty, please contact your subject librarian. Students can learn more about using the library’s e-resources at our workshops and visit us at the Reference (Ask a Librarian) desk for more help.
We’re excited to announce a new edition of CityTech Stories, the official podcast of the Ursula C. Schwerin Library. Most recently, we featured Prof. Colleen Birchett, and Prof. Christopher Swift, who spoke of their experiences using Open Educational Resources – materials that are hosted online, free of charge for use by students and faculty alike.
Through the Open Educational Resources Faculty Fellowship, designed by librarian Cailean Cooney, participants get an in-depth look at the economics of the scholarly landscape. In the move towards open resources, faculty are encouraged to seek out material in their discipline through various OER repositories, and Open Access publications.
In the podcast above, Prof. Colleen Birchett speaks about her own path towards implementing OER, for the course Home Away From Home: Stories from the Diaspora, and impacts on both course design and content.
An excerpt from her interview: “One of the limitations that I’ve faced as an instructor is the fixed content in a given textbook: someone else decides, and that’s their worldview, and their pedagogical view. Whose voices get heard and whose don’t?”
We’re so happy to present these excellent reflections by CityTech faculty, a window into the innovative pedagogy that continues to be inspired by the Fellowship. Thank you for listening!
Episode 3 Transcript
Thanks to Aisha Khan for transcribing this episode. – JT
CityTech Stories Podcast – Episode 3 Interview with Colleen Birchett
Elvis: Welcome to City Tech Stories! A podcast highlighting the experiences and voices of the City Tech community. Each episode will center around a theme and include perspectives from across the college. I’m Elvis Bakaitis, an adjunct reference librarian here at City Tech. Today’s podcast is an interview with Colleen Birchett, a professor from the English Department.
Alright, hello Professor Birchett.
Prof. Birchett: Hi! How are you?
Elvis: Hi! I’m good. Thank you so much for joining us for this podcast today. I’m gonna ask you a couple questions about your participation in the O.E.R. fellowship here at City Tech. For those that are listening, OER stands for Open Educational Resources. So, I’ll start off with a background question. How long have you been teaching here at City Tech and in what discipline or department?
Prof. Birchett: Well, I have been teaching since the full of 2011, and all of my teaching, in fact, has been in the English Department. I teach writing courses and literature courses.
Elvis: Great, so, cool. That’s a good long while. How did you hear about the O.E.R. fellowship? What drew your interest and how did you kind of reach out and get involved?
Prof. Birchett: Well, I heard about it in the email and it was advertised through the email, and I guess what drew my attention is, because of my background is instructional design but it was the early stages of some of the digital technology now and so it was fascinating, the idea of updating some of my skills. And also just being able to approach teaching in different ways. So I was very excited about both the learning experience and what it could do for the classroom, so that’s what drew me to it.
Elvis: Nice! So you had some experience with digital teaching tools online?
Prof. Birchett: Yes, uh huh.
Elvis: Great! So I guess I was curious kind of, to go off that, how your students have changed in terms of their use of technology over the years since you have taught at City Tech? For a while have you seen changes, an increase in their interest in digital or something else?
Prof. Birchett: Well, their involvement with the digital delivery of various kinds of information has increased over the years. And many of the ones that I am working with now, they have been interacting with things like phones, and computers, and laptops since they were infants. You know, in fact I have nephews who, I have three nephews who all line up at a board, and they’re all under five years old and they’re all working on computers already. And so students like this are not that much older than them, and it’s like a couple decades down and I think that their whole world is digital, which is unlike my experience and the experiences of the generation before them, even the immediate generation before them. So, in addition to television, you know, they’re walking around with phones and, you know, earplugs, and everything, you know, their whole world is that. So, you have to relate to them differently than you would have before.
Elvis: That’s a good point. I’ve observed this myself with the youth today at City Tech and beyond. Yeah, and you have mentioned a project called something, a digital bibliography that students are working on currently. Can you describe a little bit about that project and kind of how you came up with it?
Prof. Birchett: Well, the course is called Writing and Social Justice and it’s based in the current 2020 election campaign. And what’s happening is we’re teaching them about discourse communities and how discourses change based on the medium, the audience, the situation, and the purpose. And so what happens is, they have been broken down into four theme groups and like environmentalism, immigration, racism, and technology and women’s issues. So within each one of those, they’re seeking discourse communities that are attached to specific controversies that they’re working in. So for example, they’re interested in DACA and it’s survival, they’re looking at, they’re trying to locate discourse communities who are dealing with that issue in different ways and who have different discourses and different symbol systems, and different languages, and whose communities are diverse based on their specific interests, and their specific relationship to the problem. So, one of their projects is to create a digital bibliography so that, I take them into the lab and they create a page in which they break down different type of discourse communities. Underneath those they identify online different groups and their different discourses, you know, their artifacts, their newsletters and all. And once they do that, then my plan is that they upload it into a blog so that all in their group will be able to see all the different groups that relate to all the different issues. And that’s something that this type technology really makes this possible, and it’s just beautiful because they can just put that online and other people can see it and it can be uploaded in an O.E.R. online so that people across the country can possibly see it. So these are things you could not do if you were limited to print. So that’s their project that they are working on now.
Elvis: Oh that’s awesome, yeah. It sounds really conceptually rich, you know, and just like different cultural backgrounds and kind of letting students guide their own interests, you know, ‘cause, yeah. That always seems to go best, obviously. But that’s great, yeah. Thank you for sharing about that. I hadn’t heard the term digital bibliography before, so, I like that. Yeah, I guess it kinda leads us to the question that how did the students receive the O.E.R.? Did you feel like that they kind of understood the concept of having class on the open lab? Were they able to access things? You know, what was sort of their intuitive reaction to using that and maybe instead of a textbook or like an anthology and maybe describe what you were using before that.
Prof. Birchett: I was really surprised at how quickly they were able to adapt to it, because in their daily life they are doing all kinds of different things similarly to that and I was really surprised how there is some diversity in the classroom in terms of the ranges of their exposure to these different kinds of things so the class is not all the same. But I think that generally speaking, they catch on very quickly especially if you take them into lab and introduce it to them there, they can quickly catch on and quickly catch up those who aren’t able to process what’s going on. So they were able to adapt to it very easily.
Elvis: Cool. That’s great, yeah. It’s always interesting the print vs. digital question comes up a lot and sometimes we have faculty who is like “No, they need a book and they need a print kind of volume to ground them.” But I think you’re saying they are easily adaptable. They’ve used….
Prof. Birchett: Well there’s print online. What they’re reading is basically the same as, what is the difference from reading it in a hard bound book and reading it online? They’re essays and they’re all kinds of things and they can juxtapose different texts and see differences and similarities between those texts. Whereas if they have to go get hard bound periodicals and put them beside one another, it’s really cumbersome. And, you know, that doesn’t mean that sometimes they don’t need to do that. But basically it’s a real, it’s not eliminating the need for print, it’s just putting print in a different mode so that they can read it.
Elvis: I like that, yes. Taking a different direction of approach. That’s cool. [inaudible] …in any way so that other faculty can’t share it back and forth? So if you have any thoughts on like the pros and cons of using something like that or if you think open lab kind of makes more sense for where things are going?
Prof. Birchett: Well, I do think that the O.E.R. is in the Open Lab. They’re more accessible in many ways because everything is right in the same place and because of the advances in technology, students are able to access things more quickly than they do in Blackboard but I don’t think that it’s necessarily an either or, sometimes it can be both and because they’re certain advantages to connecting the O.E.R. with Blackboard, so that you can because sometimes there are copyright issues and lots of other things. So sometimes what can happen is you can link students to resources on Blackboard that they might not be able to put on the Open Lab. But because educational laws protect certain kinds of things for teachers to use in the classroom just for the educational purposes sometimes you can get around some of the resource restrictions because it is privatized and it’s not..the Blackboard doesn’t open it up to the whole universe so that you don’t violate certain copyright laws and so that’s one advantage on doing both. So I don’t see as a competitive and I also think that if its..an instructor develops an O.E.R. and has to go through the process of getting clearances on a copyright and things like that by having both available while you’re in that process it makes it easier to be able to deliver the instructions and then before you put it on it’s like Academic Works, where you can get the clearances you need and things like that. So that’s been an advantage for me because I can link them to blackboard. I use Blackboard in the process of developing an O.E.R. if I hadn’t had time to get it set up on the O.E.R.. On the Open Lab, I can develop up to an open stage on Blackboard and test it out, make it work, and then go back and the do programming itself that is necessary to put on the O.E.R.. So I think they work together nicely, that they don’t have to be competing with one another.
Elvis: I love that, that’s a very diplomatic answer. Yeah, one question that it kinda weeds into is, you had mentioned CUNY Academic Works, which is the institutional repository of CUNY for those who don’t know, it’s a ‘site that you can upload lots of scholarships onto and you can also upload O.E.R.s so I think you had mentioned that you’re O.E.R. that was on there had some downloads, and some international attention. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Prof. Birchett: Well I did an O.E.R. and I learned how to do it right here in CUNY department at City Tech and I posted it, it was posted on Academic Works and every month they send me an email and it allows me to see exactly how many downloads it has had and where in the country because it allows instructors to go on the site, the platform, and download the manuel or download the syllabus either one. So what’s happened, I was surprised that over a period of about a year or maybe less they have…I have had 73 downloads across a wide variety of counties, from England to China to Taiwan to all over the United States, up and down the East Coast, in CUNY, on the West Coast. So it’s amazing to me that people have downloaded and because I have given them permission to adapt it for their uses that you have the system allows you to decide what type licensing you have your material. Can it be adapted, can it be just cloned or whatever but beat people, I don’t know exactly what people are doing but it does open up the flexibility and so I’m really happy and so I’m open to trying to get some research done using it and what have you, but it’s really great to know that you’re material is.
Elvis: Yeah, no it is great. It’s kind of exciting, “Oo I made this thing and now others [inaudible]” it’s wild! I think that’s great, it kinda highlights the core of O.E.R. which is resource sharing, you know, and just the fact that faculty do sort of work in [inaudible] and that they can tend to work within either only in their department or maybe even people in their department don’t really know what they’re up to. Even in the classroom has been a pretty closed space, so what I think is really cool about this is it’s sort of pivoting toward a more open, you know, potentially worldwide international fame but even just the idea of sharing is really new.
Prof. Birchett: And it has sort of like a social justice component to it as well because we have different, well not just within our and within CUNY and our closed classes, but across the world people are in different economic situations and this is making knowledge available to them because they would not be able to afford textbooks, you know, and some other kind, you know, because I know that many organizations that were in, you know churches and so forth, donate textbooks [inaudible] textbooks have over the years to various places around the world. But digital technology in this O.E.R., this makes it possible, you don’t have to come up with the money to mail it to them, you don’t have to have a garage where everyone brings their old textbooks from the libraries and have people shipping them, you don’t have to do any of that! Just press a button and it’s there! And I think that is marvellous, you know.
Elvis: Yeah, that is. And I think that’s really interesting too ‘cause I think there’s a lot of potential for O.E.R. in the future for kind of cross collaborative…
Prof. Birchett: Oh Yeah!
Elvis:..you know with interactions with communities ‘cause you wouldn’t want to be one directional…
Prof. Birchett: Right! Right!
Elvis:…like the rest will supply, you know, education, so I like that.
Prof. Birchett: Definitely, that’s another component, yes
Elvis:…two way streak…
Prof. Birchett:..yes, definitely…
Elvis: So yeah, that’s super great. Yeah, I think one of my last questions was, and maybe circling around some of those issues of content ‘cause you have spoke of how previously you’re releasing an anthology, you know, that was sort of assigned, it has a fixed amount of text and the topic is to export voices, right?
Prof. Birchett: Yeah.
Elvis: So you wanna bring in other things, so can you talk about how it changed the content of your class?
Prof. Birchett: Well I think one of the limitations that I faced over and over again as an instructor is the fixed content in a given textbook because someone else decides what goes in and what goes out and that’s sort of their role view and their kind of going into their political view, and it’s also, you know, how they view their textbook, and many many textbooks go through so many revision processes and there are certain centers in our country who dominate the textbook industry and it’s their theology, you know, concept of the world that gets into the text and whose voices get heard and whose don’t. Well one of the things that O.E.R. allows you to do is sort of modify that and not only for your own conception and so forth, but it also gives you the opportunity to adapt it as times change and issues come up on the national and international scene, you can adapt it much more easily than you can a textbook so it meets the need so my particular book that I did,text, has to do with giving voice to diaspora voices, people who come here from around the world and some of the struggles they had have, being able to adapt to the American society. And so many of them have become authors and they had written about their experiences, and so I have, I represent…this was a very short summer course so..it had to be condensed and so what I did I only utilized the works of four authors but each one represented a different continent and each one I talked about, of course no one person can represent a whole continent, but basically they were examined against the backdrop of the historical background of that particular culture. Like we looked at Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie work representing Nigeria and the students looked at, learned about the whole history of Nigeria, the Biafra War, all the different generations of immigrants that have come from the, back in the mid-twentieth century to today and she represents more modern group that represents this era, millennial generation and so they were able to learn all that and so I can select the content, I can pull together the resources much of what was digital from all over from Nigeria. The next one that we did was Neil Patel from India and we talked about his story and we went Laura Vopniah who was a Soviet Russian Jew and her experience and her grandparents experience of the Nazis and the idea of Hitler and all this and that era and they were able to learn about that. And then the last one that we looked at was Juno Diaz who represented Latin America [inaudible] Domincan Republic…I moved it over to Latin America. And but many of our students are from the Domincan Republic so they were able to talk about his experience and then they were really able to engage in their own experiences and talk about similarities and background and grandparents and so forth. It was really a fascinating course to teach but I think it was all abled by digital technology, the Open Educational Resources and open lab. And that is a course that other people can access once it’s put on Academic Works. So I was really excited about it and Elvis, you are the one who helped me to post it.
Elvis: Ahh excellent!
Prof. Birchett: So I wanna thank you [inaudible].
Elvis: Ahh thank you so much, I didn’t even notice. Yeah that course sounds amazing. I mean I think just exposing students to all these, you know, because I know City Tech students are from so many different backgrounds, you know, and you can only imagine that, okay, they only know their own experience, they know their family’s experience, you know their parents, but I think imagining, kind of transposing those things onto another culture, seeing what’s different, other time periods I think…
Prof. Birchett: Yeah.
Elvis: …that’s so rich with possibility. So yeah, thank you, that’s great. Yeah, I guess, finally to bring it back to City Tech students, I was just gonna say, I mean City Tech students given that they are from so many different backgrounds, and so many socioeconomic, kind of contacts, would you say that the OER, did they have a positive reaction to not having to buy a textbook, I mean….
Prof. Birchett: Yes, they did! They really, really did because they didn’t even know what some of these students are experiencing in their everyday lives. I’ve talked to counselors who work with students here and they opened my eyes to, really, some really desperate situations. People don’t have food…..,students don’t have food. Sometimes students are working as translators for their families, and maybe the only ones who have enough facility in english to negotiate with the outside world. Many of them are helping to support their families. Many of them, in the current, political context of the country, are frightened that even they or their parents, or loved ones, or their friends might be deported or might not allowed to come into the country because they’re banned list. And their a lot of things like that many of them are very much upset about. And many times we don’t even know why there’s an alternate [inaudible] you know, it’s more than just their ability to understand to work, many of it is really distracted. And so I think, just taking one load off of them and not insisting that they pay $100 for a textbook that they might not use more than a chapter of is really a gift that O.E.R., the O.E.R. system and the digital technology and all bring to City Tech students because we don’t, we can’t even imagine how wildly diverse their backgrounds are socioeconomically, not just culturally but there many other aspects and I think the digital technology does have a way of helping us all with those different aspects and relieving different elements of their life that bring on pressure to students.
Elvis: Thank you. Yeah, I think that is a great window into the world of City Tech you know for people who will be listening and a little bit of context but yeah. We have no idea what students and their [inaudible], everybody is different so like which specific situation they’re dealing with. But yeah, thank you for bringing it together with O.E.R., I appreciate it. So I think for that concludes our time with Professor Birchett, but thank you so much for joining us on this podcast.
Prof. Birchett: Thank you for the invitation!
Elvis: Yes! See you soon on our next…
Prof. Birchett: Okay! Thank You!
Elvis: Thank you!
Elvis: Thanks for listening! Next episode will feature Professor Christopher Swift from the Theater Department here at City Tech! See you next time!
This academic year, the Library is offering three opportunities for faculty to participate in the OER Fellowship program. There are sessions running in the Fall and Spring terms, and an intensive version of the Fellowship will take place in June 2019. Over the course of the Fellowship, faculty are working to convert their course to zero-cost openly-licensed educational materials (OER).
The Library is also offering several new OER focused workshops offered several with a focus strengthening the accessibility of course sites, and providing support for faculty to make tweaks and updates to their OER. A workshop about the Open Textbook Library ran in February, giving faculty the opportunity to complete a review of an open textbook in their discipline.
Consider checking out some recent posts on the Library blog by Prof. Elvis Bakaitis about topics relating to the development of OER, concepts of “open,” digital pedagogy, and the topic of labor.
The Labor of “Open” – This post takes a look into current conversations about OER creation, faculty workload, and the role of educational technology.
OER in the News – A recap of news coverage of Open Educational Resources, and trends across higher education.
Interactive Education and OER – For those interested in the intersections of pedagogy, emerging technologies, and OER, a short recap of notable projects.
This year marks the 50th Anniversary of African American Studies courses coming to college campuses across the country. The City Tech Library was proud to offer our support the African American Studies Department as they celebrated with a series of displays and events that took place during Black History Month.
The Department sponsored an exhibit of materials related to Zora Neale Hurston and her unique contributions to anthropology, literature, and folklore. There was an opening ceremony for the exhibit on February 5th and the exhibit ran through the month of February.
Professor Clyde participated in this years’ National African American Read-In event held at the City Tech Academic Complex on February 14th. City Tech students, faculty and staff read excerpts from seminal Africana texts.
The celebration of Black History Month ended with a keynote event featured author T.R. Simon and musician/composer Khuent Rose. City Tech students presented during the community conversation that focused on storytelling in Africana communities.
There was an incredible amount of academic innovation in the field over the last 50 years and this changed academia and the culture at large. It is particularly exciting to envision where the field will be in the next 50 years.
This academic year, the library rolled out a new program: its Scholarly Publishing Clinic. The Scholarly Publishing Clinic provides assistance related to all phases of the academic publishing process. We offer support for the literature review and creating alerts, using citation managers, picking the best journal or publisher, author rights, using Academic Works (our institutional repository), how to create a Google Scholar profile and otherwise increase and document the impact of one’s scholarship.
The idea was to provide help to faculty a la carte where format and content can be guided by the faculty member’s need and availability. We created an appointment form to help maximize the quality of the consultation. Drop-in office hours provide faculty an opportunity to get help on short notice. We also offer one-on-one and small group consultations as well as departmental visits and workshops.
It’s always a pleasure to learn more about the scholarship of our colleagues outside of the library. When we meet face-to-face, the conversations are helpful not only to classroom faculty but also to helping us better understand how the library can address some of the challenges faced by our colleagues.
Drop-in hours are from 12-1 PM, every first Thursday for Spring 2019 and are subject to change every semester.
Abrams, K., Tidal, J. (2018, November). Optimizing Library Marketing with Short Links. Presented at the Library Marketing and Communications Conference, Saint Louis, MO.
Kimberly Abrams worked with Profs. Nora Almeida and Junior Tidal to procure a PSC-CUNY grant for a wayfinding study and are currently analyzing findings. She is writing an article based on the Optimizing Library Marketing with Short Links presentation at LMCC. And she is also working with Prof. Marissa Moran of the Law and Paralegal Studies Department at City Tech to study the impact of discipline-specific information literacy acquisition via LibGuides.
Nora Almeida’s recent publications and conference presentations include:
Contested Sites of Critical Library Pedagogy. [Presentation with Ian Beilin, Columbia University] Critical Library and Pedagogy Symposium, University of Arizona, November 16, 2018.
This year Nora was the PI on a PSC CUNY Research Grant to fund a library wayfinding study she conducted in Fall 2018 with colleagues Kim Abrams and Junior Tidal. Her article “Living Archives in the Anthropocene” which she co-authored with Jen Hoyer from the Brooklyn Public Library is forthcoming in a special issue of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies. She is also working on an edited book project called the Social Movement Archive (Litwin Books) in collaboration with Jen Hoyer.
Monica is writing a scholarly book on predatory publishing to be published by the Association of College and Research Libraries. Her book “unpacks” key problems in scholarly publishing. Predatory publishing is contextualized: low quality and vanity academic publishing have always existed and fraudulent scholarship is published in respected journals. Other chapters cover the topic’s history, characteristics, the research on various stakeholders, and predatory publishing as a problem of the Global South (less developed countries). The final part of the book explores existing solutions to predatory publishing and and how librarians can teach authors how to identify quality venues for publishing.
Cailean Cooney’s recent publications and conference presentations include:
Forthcoming article, “But What Do The Students Think: Results of the CUNY Cross-Campus Zero-Textbook Cost Student Survey” in Open Praxis
Infusing user-centered approaches into Open Educational Resources (O.E.R.) initiatives. Presented with Andrew McKinney at Designing for Digital (D4D) in Austin, TX. March 2018.
Cailean is currently analysing results from a usability study about open educational resources on City Tech’s OpenLab platform and is preparing to present a workshop at the OLC Innovate Conference this April about how to build universal design into college OER initiatives. In January she gave an invited presentation with CUNY colleagues, Megan Wacha and Jean Amaral, about librarians leading campus OER initiatives at Yeshiva University Library.
Anne Leonard recently published “Place-Based Learning across the Disciplines: A Living Laboratory Approach to Pedagogy,” co-authored with Prof. Karen Goodlad of City Tech’s Hospitality Management department, in InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching. She is working on a book chapter about interdisciplinary place-based learning and information literacy for a forthcoming book on virtual place-based learning in an urban learning environment. In December 2018 she earned a 200-hour Certified Yoga Teacher certification.
Maura Smale’s recent publications and conference presentations include:
Maura will present results from her fellowship leave research on undergraduate reading attitudes and practices at the Association of College & Research Libraries conference in April 2019. During the 2018-2019 academic year she is working with research partner Prof. Mariana Regalado of Brooklyn College to collect data on the student research process in composition courses, and looks forward to analyzing and beginning to share results this coming summer.
Junior Tidal’s recent publications and conference presentations include:
Accessibility and the City Tech Library Website, a presentation of the library’s efforts in modifying its website to meet accessibility standards at The L’Association des Bibliothécaires du Québec (Quebec Library Association) 86th Annual Conference, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada, April 8th, 2018.
This year, Junior has two forthcoming book chapters. The first looks at the history of the library’s intranet for in the book, Libraries that Learn: Keys to Managing Organizational Knowledge. The other chapter, “Is Anybody Out There? Using Application Statistics and Web Analytics to Assess Social Media Reach,”will be published in the book, Social Media for Communication and Instruction in Academic Libraries. He has also submitted a PSC-CUNY grant to examine students’ emotional responses when using the Onesearch discovery tool.
In addition to the library’s in-person instruction program, we’ve been working on developing (and assessing) online resources for students. For the past two years, we’ve also been focusing on integrating digital library guides, tutorials, and resources with the platforms that most City Tech faculty use in their classrooms: OpenLab and Blackboard.
Some of our current projects include a usability study to improve the landing page for Library Research Guides. Edra Stefaj, our Instructional Design intern, launched the study last week and wrote up a description of the project and our methodology on the Library Buzz Blog!
Also, underway is a project to seamlessly integrate library guides into Blackboard courses and to embed library widgets in OpenLab course templates. For more on that project, check out our recent write up: The Library is in your Course!
Over the past 3 years, with the help of graduate students, we’ve created a collection of self paced online tutorials that students can complete in under three minutes. Check out our latest tutorial on search strategies.
We’ve also made some updates to our library orientation website. If you (or your students) are new to the library and want to learn the basics of what we offer and dust off some research skills, check out our interactive online orientation.
Behind the scenes at the City Tech Library we’re often thinking about how to reach students. It might seem strange to learn that the Library, which is right in the middle of campus and often so full of people that there isn’t an empty seat to be found, worries a lot about outreach. But we know that some of the same people who visit the library almost every day have never borrowed a book, searched our vast digital research collection for an article, used one of our interactive tutorials, or attended a library workshop. Beyond getting students to really use the library, we also want City Tech students to think of the library as more than a space or collection of (physical and digital) stuff. We want them to see the library the way we see it: as a critical point of intersection, a kind of bridge between the academic and communal aspects of college life.
Our Library Promotion, Outreach, and Marketing (PROM) committee is constantly exploring new strategies to make students see the library as a space for them: full of the programs and resources to support their work and full of people who want to answer their questions and make their college experience a little bit better. Behind every display, blog post, workshop, film screening, or tabling event is a bunch of work that involves a bunch of people, both in and outside of the library. Interns from our COM-D department make our posters, the Office of Student Life includes us in college orientation and student events, Library students help us create new online tutorials and conduct usability studies to assess our digital tools, we collaborate with SGA to make student voices heard, and we partner our local NYPIRG chapter to ensure students are engaged in the political issues that effect them. We also routinely partner with academic departments and faculty from across the college to provide meaningful instruction, put on exhibits and events, and to make sure our resources and collections really provide students with the support they need to succeed in college.
Below are a few photos of our favorite outreach initiatives from the past year. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter to keep tabs on what we’re up to next and stay tuned for our new podcast, which we plan to launch later this semester.
Screen printing posters with NYPIRG during club hour for Higher Education Action DayButton designs for a voter registration campaign in collaboration with NYPIRGT-Shirt Day collaboration with the Wise Center and local women’s sheltersBanned Books display to celebrate Banned Books Week
It’s easy to forget that “as recently as the 1970s, women’s history was virtually an unknown topic in the K-12 curriculum or in general public consciousness. ” That’s a quote from the National Women’s History Alliance, the group that fought for it to become a federally recognized month – which occurred, after an initial state-by-state adoption, in 1987.
Although vast strides have been made since the 1970’s, women’s history is still a culturally marginalized topic. The vast majority of commemorative statues in the United States are of male historical figures – of the 5,193 public statues, only 394 (or 7.5%) are of women. New York City, for example, boasts 150 statues of men, and a corresponding 5 statues of historically notable female figures.
Not a historical figure, but a prominent statue nonetheless. Image credit: Statue of Liberty, nps.gov.
An interesting report, published by the National Women’s History Museum (an organization that seeks to establish a museum of that title in Washington, D.C.), delves deeply into the problem of women’s representation in history textbooks. They suggest that our collective understanding of history would have to radically shift to re-center women, noting that: “As long as history curriculum follows the traditional [historical] timeline, the study of women’s experiences is subject to marginalization. ”
Headline from Slate, January 6, 2016
And finally, to bring us back into the traditional library realm of books, there arehuge imbalances in the publishing of books about women (biographies, history, etc.). If the month of March inspires you to do nothing else, consider reading a book about, or authored by, a woman from the past – it may help to bring the present moment into sharper focus.
Yi Chen, IT Associate, and Anderson Uribe, College Assistant, have been coding numerous software applications to improve the City Tech Library’s operations. Using free, open source software (OSS), they have developed a college assistant time sheet system, a technology loan web application, and the library’s print management system, UrsulaPrint.
