This semester I have the pleasure of interning at Yuba College, a small community college in the rural, agricultural central valley of California. As it is relatively local (within an hour drive) I met with the Librarian over the Christmas holiday to have a tour of the library and to talk about what she had planned for the upcoming semester.
Yuba College is a very small community college, and as such, she is the only Librarian. She has full autonomy for anything she does. I am working virtually with Credo Reference and I gave her an overview of what I provide for Credo in hope that she could use some of my skills. During the meeting I was able to walk her through a quick tutorial of the Credo Reference Librarian Admin section and we went through the past year of Credo search stats for her library. The findings (search terms, books searched, etc.) corroborated what she had mentioned were the most popular topics due to common assignments. They have a very robust nursing program, and there is a popular first year assignment for the student to write a paper on a contemporary issue. It was very interesting. For a first assignment, she is having me update her Credo admin section.
My other duties will be to maintain the social media and come up with a posting schedule. She thought every other week might be a good schedule. She has plans to do an essay contest this semester; the prompt is “how the library has helped you in your academic career”, and she requested my help is setting up the contest rules and to generally assist with the contest. Finally, she wanted a “welcome to the library” video, which I am starting on getting a draft together.
With my work in Credo I have had the opportunity to work with very large academic libraries (Columbia University, Duquesne, and the entire LOUIS Consortia, etc.) and I am highly used to the academic politics that come with such large universities. I am very excited to work with a small college with little to no politics and much more professional freedom. It will make for a very interesting semester!
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