By Sarah M. Pritchard, Dean of Libraries and Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian
Libraries are essential services to a campus in the best of times. For the past two months that has been doubly, or even ten times, true!
I cannot say that spring quarter 2020 has been “business as usual” at the Libraries — truly, the COVID-19 era has upended everything we used to know as “usual.” But I am proud to say that, thanks to the creativity, tirelessness, and dogged determination of our librarians, we are delivering record numbers of personalized solutions and consultations to our community this quarter. We are finding digital resources to replace physical ones in classrooms, coaching faculty grappling with new tools and processes, consulting with researchers pursuing their work remotely, and continuing the delivery of those essential scholarly services that Northwestern has long relied on.
So it may not be business as usual, but it is certainly continuity as usual for serving our community.
If we were sitting across from one another at an in-person event — remember those? — I would happily regale you with the ways we have leapt into action. In the name of social distancing, however, allow me to recount just a few examples in this digital space:
- Organizing the digital stacks. Libraries are clearinghouses of information, and in this time of crisis, managing the flow of that information is critical. We quickly aggregated all the resources for remote learning in our COVID-19 web site, many of which were brand new free resources that publishers and copyright holders made available for classroom use.
- Workshops. To help faculty and graduate students manage the sudden transition, we have conducted numerous targeted workshops on remote instruction and research. We want to ensure that these groups can get the full potential from all our resources — not only from our own online collections, but also the many temporarily free resources that publishers and organizations have made available. Whether it is a primer on copyright or insights into collections like HathiTrust, more than 100 of our campus partners have taken us up on the instruction.
- Consultations. We always provide personalized, one-on-one consultations with our students and faculty, but we are seeing a dramatic increase compared to the same period last year. In April alone we performed 393 such interactions; faculty consultations were 5.7 times higher than last April.
- Rare materials in classrooms. Typically, classrooms visit our secure reading rooms to view the rare books and manuscripts in our collections. In a time of remote learning, we must find creative ways to bring the digital equivalent to them! Read librarian Jason Nargis’ description of how this worked for one class.
- Immediate support via chat. Likewise, we have always offered a chat service backed by librarians and trained staff who can field urgent requests or help finding resources. But this spring we reinforced this service; now librarians and expert staff are available for 70 hours of immediate support even on evenings and weekends. The volume of inquiries coming in is almost double this period last year.
- E-book purchases. Many of the materials our faculty and students seek are already available through us digitally, or through free access offers from HathiTrust or JSTOR. When those options come up short, we will purchase an e-book whenever possible – even if we already own the print version. For a period in March and April we purchased 107 books this way, compared to just 5 in the same period a year ago.
- E-reserve usage. In a normal quarter, our course reserves keep high-demand physical items available for short-term loans. This works for electronic resources, too, and here we have been prolific as well. We have more than 3,800 items on e-reserve at this point of the quarter. Audiovisual services are included here, too, for the 158 classes currently using them: We’ve fulfilled more than 600 streaming media requests so far this quarter.
- OER grants. Our efforts to help hold down textbook costs for students dovetail nicely with our work on the Affordable Instructional Resources initiative. This project, co-sponsored by the Libraries and the Provost’s office, funds the faculty creation of Open Educational Resources (free digital materials for use in Northwestern undergraduate courses). Now in its second year, the program’s most recent grants (link to come) to four faculty are expected to save 1,300 students almost $250,000.
- Remote access to library computers. Faculty and students use the free computers in our McGowan Information Commons for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is access to essential software that they may not own themselves. Thanks to the efforts of our IT team, the Northwestern community can now log in remotely to our computers to use software such as SPSS and SAS (statistics), MATLAB (mathematics) and the Adobe Creative Suite (graphic design).
I eagerly await the day our doors are open again, and our halls are filled with the vibrancy of normal campus life. Until then, I wish you and your loved ones good health.