#LibraryNews - Loras College Library at Loras College

We hope you’ve had a chance to recover from the busy year we’ve just had. While we’re sure you are tired of hearing about things changing, the Library wants to let you know about some changes coming this summer so you have plenty of time to plan for the Fall semester.

New Catalog: after years of searching for Harry Potter and getting a page of results that didn’t include the books by J. K. Rowling, we are getting a new system with all sorts of bells and whistles to help our students find books and journal articles all in one place.
Some adjustments in our database selection: The State of Iowa helps financially support our databases and their offerings are different this year. This mostly effects our general databases, most of our specialized databases will stay the same and we’ll have some fun new databases for you to use.
New ILL System: you won’t see much of a difference in the service, other than a new request screen, but the back end changes will make it much easier for us to find and request the items you’re looking for.
Research Help: In addition to a whole new look, we’re changing the Research Help Center into an appointment based research service. Don’t worry, we’ll still have drop in research help at the Checkout Desk, but we feel appointments will allow us to give students more personalized assistance. Want to make sure your students use the service? We’d be happy to track usage so you can give them extra credit.

What does this mean for you?

Most of these changes are still in progress so keep an eye out for more information as we get closer to the Fall semester. In the meantime:

Add our syllabi statement to your syllabus, Jen will be sending out an updated statement with important information for your students.
Stop by for a preview, we’d be happy to show you what we’ve been working on.
Don’t forget to schedule a library instruction session – your students may have a little trouble finding what they need with all the changes.
Enjoy your summer and know we are working to make these changes as smooth as possible for everyone.

Please contact one of us if you have any questions!

Joyce, Library Director, x7164
Kris, eResources and Research Services Librarian, x7042
Heidi, Special Collections and Technical Services Librarian, x7873
Jen, Instruction Services Librarian, x7917
Laura, Circulation Services Librarian, x7125

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Changes coming to the library

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