Greetings, everyone! We are well into the fall semester at this point and quite busy. Our biggest news is that the Princeton Review rated the SU Libraries the no. 10 best college library in the country, an astounding rise from the days when we were in the bottom five. The lovely Guerrieri Academic Commons is, of course, a major factor in that, but so are the staff who make it a warm and welcoming place where students know they can get help and where they feel at home.
Working in the library has many benefits for students. It’s convenient, they learn some key life skills, and, depending on their job, they get to interact with a variety of people. But it also improves their academic performance, as the students in our student worker profiles over the years have testified. One survey (not at SU) found that 82% of student workers believed that working in the library increased their academic success.
In each issue of Library Matters, we profile one or two of our student workers. We could not run the Libraries without them. In addition to the essential functions they perform, they generally are delightful people and bring much joy to our workplace. Today we profile Emmanuela Angu and Grace Rail.
We are always looking for ways to encourage and support reading, whether for school or pleasure. To that end, the SU Libraries have joined the Library Speakers Consortium, which provides online author talks several times each month. The authors represent all manner of genres. See below for the upcoming speakers and dates.
The SU Libraries’ Course Enhancement Grants support faculty in taking better advantage of our terrific librarians and resources for their courses. First awarded for the 2018-19 academic year, the grants have spurred faculty across campus to work with librarians in creative ways, enriching students’ use of library resources and their understanding of how to find, evaluate, and use information.
Each spring, the SU Libraries sponsors a contest to award prizes for the best undergraduate research projects/papers using library resources for classes during the previous calendar year. There are two prizes, each $250: one for the best junior-senior project/paper and one for the best freshman-sophomore project/paper.
Special collections—manuscripts, photographs, audio and video recordings, graphics of various types, rare books—increasingly are what distinguish one academic library from another. In the last issue of Library Matters, we highlighted several unusual collection items in the Nabb Research Center, the special collections division of the Salisbury University Libraries.