NYSHEI News

Utica College is an independent, comprehensive institution that enrolls 2,429 full- and part-time undergraduate students, and 523 full- and part-time graduate students. The College offers 32 undergraduate degrees, 13 master’s degrees and 2 doctoral degrees. Utica College is located in Utica, N.Y., 50 miles east of Syracuse and 90 miles west of Albany.

The Utica College Frank E. Gannett Memorial Library provides a physical and virtual focal point for learning, teaching, and research. Our collection includes nearly 200,000 volumes, 1,200 current serial subscriptions, and a microform collection of more than 60,000 units. The physical collection is supplemented by access to over 25,000 electronic journals and more than 90 research databases, allowing students and faculty to conduct scholarly research from any computer with an Internet connection, on or off campus. Fifteen reference computer workstations and sixteen laptops with wireless internet connectivity are available for student use, as well as networked print stations, photocopiers, flatbed scanners, and microform readers. Five group study rooms are available to UC students for collaborative academic purposes. The library launched an electronic reserve (e-reserve) service this fall semester, providing students with 24 hour access to journal articles that faculty place on course reserve. Five reference librarians offer personalized one-to-one reference service 65 hours per week and conduct nearly 100 library instruction classes each year. To provide round-the-clock reference services, we have entered into an agreement with the Central New York Library Resources Council (CLRC) for 2008 to participate in the regional virtual reference services project Ask Us 24/7.

The Library’s Jocelyn Romano Candido Rare Book Room features the Harry F. Jackson Welsh Collection, which is the largest 19th and early 20th century Welsh-language literature in the United States. Most of the Welsh Collection was printed by Welsh settlers living within 30 miles of Utica. The Edmonds Room houses the personal library and papers of Walter D. Edmonds, noted author of Drums Along the Mohawk. The Edmonds Room is available for group study. Both of these collections attract national and international visiting scholars.

The Library is open 98 hours per week during the academic year when classes are in session. For more information about the Library’s print or online collections, as well as our services and hours, please visit us on the Web at (http://www.utica.edu/academic/library/).

The Rensselaer Research Libraries, comprised of the Folsom Library and the Architecture Library, provide the university community with information resources and services in support of both teaching and research missions. Collaboration with the Cole Library, located in Hartford, Connecticut, further enhances library support on both campuses. Rensselaer was one of the founding members of the very successful Connect NY consortium whose members share rapid courier access to a combined online catalog of their book collections.

The 2005 renewal of the main floor of the Folsom Library represents its first major refurbishment since its opening in 1976. “Information hubs” disguise concrete columns and integrate physical and virtual space while offering high speed research access. Academic and social interactions are fostered in an attractive environment with newly opened vistas to the beautiful surroundings.

The “sails” art wall behind the Circulation Desk consists of an inverted Hobo-Dyer Equal Area projection map of the world featuring Rensselaer’s theme “Why not change the world?” repeated in many of the campus community’s languages. Designed by Jorge Vidal (Rensselaer class of ’91), the project has won recognition in two areas. It was named an Outstanding Project in the Educational Interiors Showcase competition by American School & University and the Library Café was featured in Fresh Cup Magazine, a trade publication for the beverage industry.

In keeping with its technological history, the application of technology to improve services and to preserve and provide access to collections is central to the Libraries’ mission. Wireless internet connectivity is available throughout the Folsom and Architecture Libraries to Rensselaer students who are all equipped with notebook computers. A project to collect and preserve electronic theses and dissertations has been implemented. Finally, the Institute Archives and Special Collections group recently rolled out an online Institute Images and Publications Database.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1824, is the nation’s oldest technological university. Located in Troy, New York, the university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in engineering, the sciences, information technology, architecture, management, and the humanities and social sciences.

Bob Mayo
RPI

Founded in 1932, Vaughn College students pursue bachelor and associate degrees in engineering, technology, management and aviation at the main campus located near LaGuardia Airport in New York City.

In addition to 42,000 shelved volumes, the library now offers 18,000 full-text periodicals and more than 35,000 e-books online. Under the leadership of Librarian Jo Ann Jayne, the library is constantly expanding its offerings and is the epicenter of knowledge for faculty and students. The library web portal is also a powerful tool and is just one aspect of the already multifaceted library resource center. The library’s resources are available online with scholarly journal articles and research databases just a few clicks away. Students, particularly students who take courses online with Vaughn, can also access an information literacy tutorial that assists them in learning effective search techniques.

As an institution focused on the fields of aviation and technology, Vaughn has acquired several significant archival materials including a piece of the Wright Flyer, a signed copy of an Amelia Earhart book autographed to one of Vaughn’s founders, a signed copy of Jimmy Doolittle’s autobiography (signed when he came to campus to receive an honorary degree), a piece of the famed Doolittle raiders airplane, and a commemorative poster signed by all of the living World War I flying aces in the early 1980s.

Librarian Director Joann Jayne, who has been with Vaughn College for more than 35 years, is excited about the future when a modern, well-equipped, two-tier library will be built as part of Vaughn’s comprehensive campaign to meet the needs of several new academic degree programs. This roughly 10,000 square foot space will include instructional and study space for the nearly 1,100 first-generation college students that Vaughn serves. The College also plans to work closely with the neighboring communities to create programming and provide resources for the largely immigrant population.

For more information about Vaughn College, please see the website at www.vaughn.edu.

New York University’s striking, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, designed by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster, is the flagship of a nine-library, 5.1 million-volume system that supports the nation’s largest private university (http://www.nyu.edu/).The Bobst Library houses more than 3.9 million volumes, 41 thousand journals, and over 5 million microforms; and provides access to thousands of electronic resources both on-site and to the NYU community around the world via the Internet. The Library is visited by more than 6,800 users per day, and circulates almost one million books annually.

Bobst Library (http://library.nyu.edu/) offers three specialized reference centers, 28 miles of open stacks shelving, and approximately 2,000 seats for student study. Bobst’s Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media is one of the world’s largest academic media centers, where students and researchers use more than 95,000 audio and video recordings per year. The Digital Studio offers a constantly evolving, leading-edge resource for faculty and student projects and promotes and supports access to digital resources for teaching, learning, research and arts events.

Bobst Library is also home to significant special collections. The Fales Collection houses one of the finest collections of English and American fiction in the United States, the unique Downtown Collection, documenting the New York literary avante-garde arts scene from the 1970s to the present, and the Food and Cookery Collection, which documents American food history with a focus on New York City. Bobst Library also houses the Tamiment Library, one of the finest collections in the world for scholarly research in labor history, socialism, anarchism, communism, and American radicalism. Tamiment includes the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, the Archives of Irish America, the Center for the Cold War and the U.S., and the Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center.

Beyond Bobst, the library of the renowned Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences focuses on research-level material in mathematics, computer science, and related fields, and the Stephen Chan Library of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts houses the rich collections that support the research and curricular needs of the Institute’s graduate programs in art history and archaeology. The Jack Brause Real Estate Library at the Real Estate Institute is the most comprehensive facility of its kind, designed to meet the information needs of the entire real estate community. Complementing the collections of the Division of Libraries are the Frederick L. Ehrman Medical Library of NYU’s School of Medicine, the Dental Center’s Waldman Memorial Library and the Law Library that serves the programs of the School of Law.

Michael Stoller
NYU

The member libraries of NYSHEI are a diverse bunch.

To help us all learn more about our colleagues, and give each library a chance to talk about what makes them unique, interesting, innovative or anything else, we begin a series of Library Spotlights.

Any member library can submit a short article about themselves, simply email me at nyshei@nyshei.org. Otherwise I expect a solicitation from me.

Thank you all for your participation and interest.