INFORMATION FOR
It’s been 3+ years since we woke up to the news of a campus closure brought on by COVID-19. It’s been a tough 3+ years. Yet with the challenges have come opportunities too. Opportunities to examine assumptions long regarded normal. To take a closer look at practices unexamined because many believed they required neither review nor rethinking. Professional assumptions and paradigms that appear to have stood the test of time and undergird professional practices are not easy to reexamine under usual circumstances. COVID-19, however, presented us with unusual circumstances. With that came opportunities to reexamine assumed realities that may have long lost their validity but retained their stranglehold through reverence. The ensuing dynamics challenge our practices, thinking, and approach to collections, services, and client engagements. They compel us to embrace a new normal that may at times take us out of our comfort zone.
With a pandemic that threatened the very foundations of things we considered sacred and dented our sense of confidence and security now over, we are finally back in fall 2023 to face the lessons and challenges, and embrace the opportunities. We are back to a new normal that in many ways looks on the sur-face like the old. If paradigms had shifted, they had not shifted enough to completely transform the face of what we do. Yet, lurking beneath the familiar, everyone understood the changes that would require greater online presence in the instructional sphere, in outreach, in reference services, in collection development, and client engagements. While at the David and Loraine Cheng Library FY23 saw a return to familiar library operations in many ways, the changes imposed by the developments in the pandemic and the need to address those are now indispensable characteristics of our new normal.
Yes, the library as it has al-ways been, remained a place, a collection, and a source of human expertise, specifically designed and committed to meeting the needs of the William Paterson University community and sup-porting student, faculty, and staff success. To that end, 124,135 people walked through our gates in FY2023, a lower number than the 130,635 that did so the previous year. We had 4,348 reference interactions, 419 less than the year before. Number of instruction sessions we conducted dropped from 229 in FY22 to 178 in FY2023 as undergraduates receiving library instruction dropped from 67% to 43%, freshmen receiving instruction dropped from 91% to 55%, and that of graduates rose from 14% to 15%. Our catalog and database searches fell from 612,321 to 595,181, global circulation from 77,352 to 75,907. Our interlibrary loan numbers also dropped slightly.
These output declines were ac-companied by improvements in collections growth, with streaming media realizing a small growth (from 90,207 to 91,091), electronic periodicals seeing better improvement (379,838 to 410,064), and electronic books seeing a significant boost (from 593,822 books to 808,204) as the numbers for their print counterparts declined slightly due to proactive weeding efforts to improve relevance. This careful balance be-tween costly proprietary resources and the pursuit of collection development strategies that increase the pool of accessible high quality academic resources through free and open access avenues must continue if the library is to provide adequate resources to meet the demands of the academy.
While providing a view of the landscape, these numbers also offer insights to inform future directions. The emergence of a strong preference for virtual resources and solutions demands close attention. Growing online offerings suggest the need for intensified efforts in the solicitation and provision of more virtual information literacy sessions. To that end, challenges in providing library instruction to students in the WP Online program call for new and innovative approaches. The ad-verse effect of the pandemic on student participation in campus activities affects library outreach efforts. Managing electronic re-sources has always been challenging given the persistence of fiscal austerity. However, Cheng Library remains resilient in exploring solutions that limit the negative impacts of these developments. It plans for the future knowing the critical role information and knowledge mediators like libraries play in the lives of academic institutions like WPUNJ.
Cheng Library will continue its active instructional program in sup-port of student information literacy and academic success. It will pursue avenues for expansion of such efforts. It will develop additional tutorial content in support of an in-creased online and hybrid student population, including WP Online, and explore the uses and challenges of implementing AI technology in areas like information literacy. As part of the library’s foray into the micro credentialing efforts of the University, Cheng Library will launch a WP LEARN digital badge within the WP LEADS digital badge student program. It will use this as a stepping-stone to the exploration and development of future library-based micro credentials.
To support the University’s efforts to build strong community relations, the Library will continue to provide outreach to the Paterson Public Schools and other schools in northern New Jersey through online teacher professional development and library instruction sessions and workshops for K-12 students in-person and online. In FY23, the Library held library instruction, National History Day, and Advanced Placement sessions for area schools, and numerous outreach events in support of K-12 teachers. It led the 4th annual WP Real Men Read program where 26 William Paterson University faculty, staff, and students conducted 78 in-person and virtual readings to some 1,400 K-12 students. The Library looks to continue such outreach. Such activities and relationships with our surrounding communities serve the common good and promote the WPUNJ brand.
Having implemented the integration of PressBooks into Blackboard to allow faculty to create, edit, and integrate no or low-cost materials into their courses, the library hopes to see more class-room faculty compose original materials or revise/remix existing OER books or chapters and collaborate with others in doing so. Cheng Library also initiated an OER/Zero-Cost Assistance pro-gram that allows faculty to re-quest assistance with a form on the Library’s website to identify OER or library-owned materials to supplement or replace existing course content. Cheng Library faculty look forward to working with their classroom colleagues to ensure textbook affordability at WPUNJ. Textbook affordability ranks high among student concerns nationally. Cheng librarians seek to collaborate with their classroom counterparts to eliminate this persistent source of aggravation for our students.
Overall, fiscal year 2022-2023 was a successful one at Cheng Library as the normalization of library service and activities advanced at a good pace and the library achieved most of its articulated goals. The library provided adequate resources for teaching and learning, excellent support for re-search, and comfortable and appealing environments and conditions for study, socialization, and group engagements. It did these in a fiscally responsible manner. Cheng Library recognizes that to remain central to the University, it must instruct more and in creative ways, reach out to more, interact with more, welcome more into its spaces and beyond, and support more in their teaching and learning endeavors. It must embrace the momentum of a vibrant campus to revitalize its collections, spaces, and services. It must be a collaborating peer and campus leader.
We look forward to welcoming and working with you at your library.
