Welcome to Fresh@News, Villanova's e-mail newsletter for parents
and friends of the Class of 2013. Over the year we will be sending you
occasional postings about activities at Villanova University that relate the
Freshman Class. Instructions on how to subscribe or unsubscribe from this
service are given at the end of this posting.
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This
week, Fresh@News has interviewed Mr. Joseph Lucia, Director
of Falvey Library.
Fresh@News: How do first year students
feel about the library?
Joseph Lucia: I
hope freshman students see the library as a welcoming and inviting place to
socialize, interact and explore intellectually. My concern is that they not
assume that the library is unimportant to them because they grew up in a
digital world that makes the library’s bookish heritage seem irrelevant
to current learning and study needs. A good contemporary academic library
functions as a setting for group study, a collaborative environment for
interacting around computers, a place to connect with complex digital resources
while receiving instructional assistance from a librarian, and a venue for a
broad mix of cultural and intellectual events (lecture, readings, discussions,
debates, exhibits, book signings, receptions). We provide students with a
lively & diverse learning environment.
Fresh@News: Often, freshman students
report that the library is overwhelming and intimidating. What can we do to
help relieve some of these anxieties?
Joseph Lucia: A lot of students, but
especially freshman students, are anxious about admitting they don’t
understand what an academic library can offer them. Our goal is to make them
comfortable when they are afraid of asking. It’s easy for students to
think they’ve found all the information needed for their assignments through
doing a Google search, but that's not always the best or most reliable source. We
are here to provide support and assistance to make sure they have the best
possible information available to them. This library spends several million
dollars annually for licensed content of that caliber – and that’s
what the freshman need to learn to find and use in their course work.
Fresh@News: What are freshman students
coming to the library for?
Joseph Lucia: Students visit the library
for a number of reasons. They come to study, both individually and to meet in the
group study rooms. They come for quick access to email if they don’t have
their laptop with them or they borrow one of our laptops and use the wireless
network to sit on a couch and write, browse the Web, view Facebook, and other
similar tasks. They come for assistance with class assignments. In general,
freshman are not in a lot of research-oriented classes, which require frequent
visits for research. I would say that they are more casual users of the
library. With that in mind, our mission is to make them feel comfortable from
the start, so they will see the library as a place to come when they need
assistance in the future.
Fresh@News: Given the amount of
resources available in the library, do students receive any formal training on
what’s available?
Joseph Lucia: Many faculty who teach
entry level courses for freshmen bring students in to learn about the basic
research tools in their fields. It doesn’t have to always be in the
library. Often librarians come to their classes and teach students about the
resources available.
Fresh@News: What is happening at the
library this year?
Joseph Lucia: We are continuously
working to better connect the library to academic departments
& curricula. In addition, the library is a key partner in the
sponsorship of One Book Villanova, and we have a number of events planned
around Rooftops
of Tehran by
Mahbod Seraji. We are working very hard to make
the library a center for intellectual and cultural exchange, almost a civic
center for campus life. And we are drawing more and more students into that
through events involving students as presenters, such as poetry readings, panel
discussions, and even debates. We feature the “Falvey
Scholars” awards in the spring. These are presentations by students who
have demonstrated excellence in undergraduate research.
Fresh@News: What services are available
on the library web site?
Joseph Lucia: Our library Website
(http://library.villanova.edu) was developed through a careful study of student
information-seeking activities. It’s a beautifully designed site
that provides a locally-developed “open source” search interface
incorporating a lot of Web 2.0 features – tagging, favorite lists,
comments & book reviews, texting of search results to cell phones –
as well as some really nice browsing functions. It includes a research
help system that enables students to ask and answer each other’s research
questions while also getting assistance from librarians, comprehensive research
guides for almost all of our academic disciplines, and it includes current news
about things going on in the library.
All of the library’s digital resources are available,
including databases, research aids, full texts of e-journals, e-books, and
reference sources, course reserves, online reference assistance, and services
to directly borrow resources from other libraries. In addition, the Falvey
Print Center came online to offer more sophisticated services – color
printing, binding, poster printing, etc.
There are, of course, still many important print materials that
you can’t get on the website and that require students to come into the
building. For the most part though, the website is one source that is as
complete as we can make it. Students can access it from their room or any
building on campus, 24 hours a day, 7 seven days a week.
Fresh@News: What advice would you give
to parents? How they can be helpful?
Joseph Lucia: Most parents will do this
anyway: talk to your children about what they are learning and doing here. Ask
them if they have ever used the library. If they say no, ask them why not?
Fresh@News: You’ve been at
Villanova seven years now. How do you like being the Director of the Library?
Joseph Lucia: I love it. It’s full
of challenges and new things form one day to the next. This is an exciting time
to be in academic library. Living through a revolution of how libraries carry
out their mission and deliver services. We’ve gotten past the naïve
assumption of the first “dot com boom” that libraries were going to
wither away and everything was going to be available online. We’re able
to focuses more clearly on the library’s educational role and the ways
the library can be a partner in student learning. And because of
Villanova’s special character as a diverse medium-sized university with a
strong funding-base for the library, we are seizing the opportunity to make our
library a leading model of the best things a contemporary library should be.
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