Technical Services: Spring 2025 Report
Introduction
This spring the Technical Services Unit supported access, discovery and delivery of materials to support Teachers College’s students, faculty and staff through cataloging, acquisitions and course reserves.
Increasing Collection Discovery
The Technical Services also began the work of remedying outdated Library of Congress Subject Headings that were still present in our catalog. As the Library of Congress updates their subject headings to better reflect current terminology, Gottesman Libraries must also update our catalog. As a result, through normalization processes, we changed two subject headings related to race in the catalog. “Slaves” and its related subject headings such as “Slave children” were changed to “Enslaved persons” and “Enslaved children. Additionally, “Blacks” and “Whites” were changed to “Black people” and “White people.”
We are also working to change other outdated subject headings in the catalog relating to Indigenous people and people with disabilities. We hope to have more updates soon!
Patron-Driven Acquisitions & Coordinated Collection Development:
This spring we completed a draft of an internal Acquisitions guidelines that will provide direction in future acquisitions for Gottesman Libraries.
Gottesman Libraries purchased more than 130 children’s books for our Juvenile collection. The books are either awards winners, finalists or shortlisted titles.
We also processed 120 student and faculty requests for new materials and added 325 new books and ebooks to the collection
New Material Requests:
Faculty requests: 77 requests
Student requests: 43 requests
Total: 120 requests
Material Type Number Added:
Ebooks: 99 ebooks
Print books: 226 books
Total: 325 books
Spring Course Resource Lists
The library entered our fourth spring term with Course Resource Lists—our course reserves platform, powered by Ex Libris’s Leganto, integrated with Educat+, and located directly within courses in Canvas.
Ex Libris’s New User Interface (UI) for Leganto was mandatory for all user institutions in January 2025. Though the Gottesman Libraries implemented the New UI well before this deadline in Summer 2024, the New UI came with many additional changes throughout the Spring months and a few bugs (that only affected library staff processing workflows). We continued to follow up on three support tickets opened with Ex Libris in 2024 to address these issues that required testing and monitoring throughout the Spring term.
Some quick statistics for the Spring 2025 term:
- 143 instructors utilized Course Resource Lists
- The library fulfilled 184 lists containing 3,653 citations
- 2,892 students were enrolled in courses that utilized Course Resource Lists
- The library acquired 61 new titles for course reserves
We continue to see modest, but ever-increasing growth in usage of Course Resource Lists, with a 5.7% increase in lists and 8.4% increase in citations from Spring 2024. Spring 2025 was our highest usage spring term since our launch of the platform in 2022.
The library was also pleased to assist with the preparation of 4 Course Resource Lists for TC’s first-ever Winter session.
We also continued our Course Resource List workshop offerings for faculty and course assistants in January and April.
Spring Resource Sharing
In the Spring 2025 term, the library continued our digital and physical Interlibrary Loan (ILL) services for current TC students, faculty, and staff, via OCLC WorldShare.
Some quick statistics for the Spring 2025 term:
- The library borrowed 184 items:
- 40 print book loans
- 108 article copies
- 36 chapter copies
- The library lent 39 items:
- 9 print books
- 11 article copies
- 19 chapter copies
- The library responded to 451 requests from TC students, faculty, and staff in total (this included directing patrons to resources available via Gottesman Libraries, Columbia Libraries, or open access)
- 7 unfilled requests
Library staff attended two Clarivate Resource Sharing webinars in February, and met one-on-one with Ex Libris support in April, as part of the first stages of a project to improve existing ILL services by integrating requests with our catalog, Educat+. We are excited to share more on this project in the coming months.
Library staff also continued to attend monthly Columbia Access Services and Operations Committee, and Reserve Sub-Committee, meetings to keep abreast of access policies at Columbia University Morningside campus libraries that may affect our patrons.
The library also maintained its presence in the semesterly Metropolitan Library Council ILL Special Interest Group and continued to participate in OCLC SHARES lending group Town Hall meetings.
Staff members also attended special sessions in the Spring term—a webinar facilitated by the University of Toronto as part of Fair Use Week in February and an OCLC Research Library Partnership webinar in May—focused on improving accessibility practices in Resource Sharing workflows.
