Library from afar
CMU’s Off-Campus Library Services serves the needs of 7,000 students who need library services for courses they’re taking online or at off-campus locations.
The library staff provides research assistance by phone, e-mail, or through online chat sessions for students who often are busy professionals and welcome the help.
“We’ll do the search for them and give them a tailored list of articles and citations to choose from,” says Tim Peters, director of OCLS. “They’ll get the citations and abstracts to choose what articles they want.”
Then the document delivery area of OCLS scans the chosen articles and e-mails them out.
Through recent surveys, students and faculty have requested more e-books and streaming videos – two collection areas where OCLS is expanding.
Peters said e-books especially are handy because they’re accessible anywhere, and they’re electronically searchable.
“It’s really a perfect technology for off-campus folks,” he says. “It provides immediate access, and it ends the shuttling back and forth of printed books.”
Peters says CMU is considered a leader nationwide in providing off-campus library services.
“This type of information delivery is getting to be more and more of what libraries are getting into,” Peters says. “CMU has been a leader for a long time. We actually have an entire department devoted to serving our off-campus students and faculty. It’s exciting to be on the front end of where libraries are going.” •
