Technical Services Report, Fall 2025

_{Autumn Birches (Approaching Storm) (1860), Albert Bierstadt, Portland Museum of Art, CC0 1.0 Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

This Fall the Technical Services unit weathered transition, with the departure of our Head of Technical Services in October 2025, but, under the leadership of our Library Director and Senior Librarian, continued to facilitate access and delivery of print and electronic resources to support Teachers College’s students, faculty, and staff through our core Acquisitions, Course Reserves, and Interlibrary Loan services.

Patron-Driven Acquisitions & Coordinated Collection Development

Our unit processed 89 requests for new materials and added 159 new titles to the collection:

New Book Requests:

• 59 faculty requests
• 25 student requests
• 5 staff requests

Total:  89 requests fulfilled

Materials Added to the Collection:

• 93 Ebooks
• 66 print books

Total:  159 books acquired

This included 41 Art and Art Education titles purchased specially with funding from the Myers Foundation, highlighted in a December entry of our blog.

Acquisitions Planning

As part of our ongoing acquisitions planning, our Library Assistant for Acquisitions attended two webinars in preparation for an eventual move from EBSCO’s Gobi marketplace to Mosaic. A session on the integration between Alma and Mosaic in September, and a session on Mosaic’s search and discovery enhancements in October.

Discovery

Our Library Assistant for Acquisitions also continued the unit’s work to increase discoverability of our holdings by adding records for newly acquired print titles to Worldcat.

Collection Maintenance

Our Technical Services Associate, with assistance from our Reference and Reader Services Library Associates, shifted 145 titles from our reserves shelves to the stacks. This is part of our ongoing work to keep our physical reserves collection edited and up-to-date.

Our Technical Services Associate also continued work on an ongoing project to update the metadata of approximately 6,500 audiovisual items in our stacks and closed stacks collections that do not have specific physical format descriptors.

Course Resource Lists

The library entered our fourth Fall 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.

Some quick statistics for the Fall 2025 term:

• 133 instructors utilized Course Resource Lists
• The library fulfilled 187 lists containing 4,077 citations
• 3,336 students were enrolled in courses that utilized Course Resource Lists
• The library acquired 58 new titles for course reserves
• The library licensed 5 films for course reserves
• The library purchased 2 articles and 6 copyright licenses for course reserve 

We continue to see modest but consecutively increasing growth in usage of Course Resource Lists, with an increase of 3 lists from Spring 2025 and 4% increase in students served from Fall 2024. Fall 2025 was our highest usage semester since our launch in Spring 2022.

Our unit also continued to test Ex Libris's Leganto AI syllabus assistant, including attending a webinar in November. We have not found an increase in efficiency when testing the tool, so have not configured it for use.

We also continued our Course Resource List workshop offerings for faculty and course assistants in September, as well as provided two individual Zoom/phone consultations, and attended the New Faculty Orientation in September.

Fall Resource Sharing

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 Fall 2025 term:

The library borrowed 138 items:

• 28 print book loans
• 89 article copies
• 21 chapter copies

The library lent 32 items:

• 10 print books
• 9 article copies
• 13 chapter copies

• 5 unfilled requests

The library responded to 481 requests from TC students, faculty, and staff in total (this included directing patrons to resources available via Gottesman Libraries, Columbia Libraries, or open access)

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, with the Reserves and Support Services Librarian becoming co-organizer.

Copyright

Our Reserves and Support Services Librarian also facilitated the library’s ABC’s of Copyright workshop in October, in time for International Open Access Week.

Library staff also attended the Copyright and AI series given by OCEAN throughout the Fall semester.