kitchen table math, the sequel: Success desk in a library without books

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Success desk in a library without books

I'm looking through my queue, trying to remember my favorites of the many things I've wanted to post over the past month .... pretty sure this is one of them.
Without stacks to organize, librarians staffing the main reference desk, which is called a success desk, will steer students to tutoring resources and train them in managing digital materials.

While the library is not paperless, students are discouraged from using its printers too much, Miller said. They can buy traditional textbooks in the bookstore, or digital texts when available.

Old-fashioned books can be requested on loan from libraries at Florida's 11 other public universities.
Only in a library with no books will you see a reference desk called a Success Desk.

3 comments:

Jean said...

Success Desk?? That sounds SO over-earnest and hokey. Does anyone, including the librarians, approach the Success Desk without rolling their eyes?

I work in a CC library. It has tens of thousands of books. Even with all that labor of managing the stacks, we are still able to spend most of our time helping students find the resources they need to learn their material and do their assignments both efficiently and well. Often this means digital resources, which we use a lot. It can also mean...books.

Auntie Ann said...

I would hope librarians would fight for the book!

Crimson Wife said...

A lot of the print materials I used from my college library were journal articles (I studied biological psychology/cognitive science) and today those would all be online. But it would definitely have annoyed me to have to order the books I used from a different library and have to wait for them to be shipped over. Especially if I wasn't totally sure they were what I actually needed.