Spring Is in the Air

Cherry blossom trees in Riverside Park. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

We expect exciting changes in spring – the cherry blossoms bloom, students hand in their final papers, seniors graduate, families visit, and we look ahead to summer. While the usual spring-time happenings indeed transpired, this past season has been overwhelmingly eventful with changes we didn’t expect. The feelings of renewal, joy, and awakening that typically thrive in spring may have been obscured by the recent events on Columbia University’s campus and around the world. 

We are proud of the students for persisting through disturbing and destabilizing times. We hope to continue to be a useful and supportive resource in the Teachers College community. 

In this Spring 2024 report, I will recap some of the ways that the Library has provided consistent services to students, staff, and faculty this past semester in research and reference.

Research Guides

We have a guide for all academic programs at Teachers College and several general purpose guides that support all areas of scholarship independent of a specific discipline. In these guides, we’ve provided resources such as selections of high-impact journals and scholarly databases to support research at Teachers College. 

We review and update these research guides to incorporate new resources and make sure information is up-to-date. For instance, we’ve added educational audio-visual collections, resources for curriculum standards, and other useful resources to our Curriculum & Teaching research guide. 

Reference and Reader Services collaborated with Special and Digital Collections to expand content in the Gottesman Libraries collection of research guides. These guides will aid researchers in accessing archival holdings and understanding unique primary resources.

Consultations

Consultations offer the Teachers College community, and affiliates, to talk one-on-one for up to an hour at a time with our reference and instruction librarians for in-depth research assistance. This past semester, we provided 90 research consultations. We’ve assisted students on a range of topics and information needs. Many consultations surround crafting literature review search strategies on topics such as the associations between Ozempic and social media, the intersections of Critical Race Theory and Special Education, and the role of listening in deliberative democratic education. We have also worked with students seeking to navigate the landscape of scholarly information in order to find Open Access literature, evaluate journals for article submission, and understand the impact and influence of research. We are finding that many students are interested in how artificial intelligence and machine learning can aid their research. This is an area Gottesman Libraries seeks to address through reference and instruction as AI presents limitations and benefits (when used conscientiously) to researchers.

Workshops

Our workshops are open to all members of the Teachers College community and our affiliate communities. They offer attendees opportunities to develop library research skills through a variety of specialized topics.

We design our workshops to meet the research and information needs of the community. Participating in the Columbia University Libraries Teaching and Learning Committee is just one way that I stay connected to research trends and activity. We see a rise across the Morningside campus in students seeking help in literature reviews in the social sciences and an increase in questions about the role of artificial intelligence in research and academic writing. 

In Spring 2024 we offered 26 workshops, over one workshop a week over the course of the semester. We revamped our “Elevate Your Research” (Thursday afternoons) series to include new workshops on EndNote, PubMed, and research impact and bibliometrics. We also incorporated a new workshop on the process of article screening for literature reviews in the “Charting Your Path” series (Wednesday afternoons). We co-presented a scholarly publishing and zine-making workshop that took place at the Barnard Zine Library. In total, our workshops had 240 attendees. This summer, we will continue to hold workshops on a regular basis and we look forward to new workshops in the fall!

Information Sessions

Through our information sessions we offer onsite, virtual, or hybrid instruction to classes on a full range of tools available to them as students at Teachers College. These sessions can be customized based upon the instructor's need to focus on specific topics, issues, or resources.  

During the Spring 2024 semester we conducted 4 information sessions to 105 students in departments such as Social and Organizational Psychology, and Education Policy and Social Analysis. We also provided a session on how to find and evaluate scholarly articles using library resources to research fellows in the Tisch Food Center. 

Service Tickets

Library users can use the “Ask a Librarian” button on our website to submit questions for response. We answered 240 questions related to reference, instruction, and our workshops.

Social Media

The Libraries continue to share our programming and highlight our collections through our social media presence on Instagram. We like to share our book displays, exhibits, events, and services with the Teachers College community. This semester, some things we highlighted were a Robert Burns manuscript held in Special Collections and the art installation, “Spectrum of Togetherness”, which we hosted in the atrium in collaboration with the Office of Diversity and Community Affairs, TC Advancing Literacy, and the Art & Art Education Program.

Check out our account to see treasures held in Special Collections, stay up to date on our events and offerings. 

For the summer....

The library continues to provide consultations, workshops, information sessions, and reference support during the summer semester. Here at Gottesman Libraries, we are using this time to maintain and enhance our online resources, develop programming for the coming academic year, and create new multimodal content to aid scholars in the research process. 

We wish the Teachers College community a wonderful summer! 

Tim (Web Services Librarian), Anna (former Circulation and Access Services Librarian), Ava (Research and Instruction Librarian), Victoria (Processing Archivist for Special Collections), and Sami (Special and Digital Collections Library Associate) during the eclipse in April!