By Roger Strong, Jr., Vice President of Gale Global Academic Sales

As digital resources proliferate and students’ needs evolve, community college libraries must continuously reinvent themselves to remain relevant and reliable resources. My company recently gathered three library professionals from across the country to share their strategies for navigating this era of technological change and budget uncertainty. Their collective insights offer a roadmap for community college libraries looking to enhance their services while managing limited resources. Here are four ways community colleges can make the most of their library resources.

1. Shining a Light on Library Resources 

The first priority for all three librarians is making sure faculty and students understand the breadth and depth of resources that the library offers. Luke Mosher, a former librarian for Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minn., holds welcome events at the beginning of the semester, tempting students with pizza, “so we can talk to them about different resources we have available,” he said.

As Alisha Webb, instructional librarian at Forsyth Technical Community College in Winston-Salem, N.C., said, “Every opportunity you have at your college, take it to shine a light on library resources and services. It doesn't have to be formal.” Advocacy can take many forms: hallway conversations with faculty, participation in campus committees, and informal gatherings can all become platforms for raising awareness about library offerings.

Brady Cross, associate librarian for collections, resource sharing, and technical services at the Tri-County Technical College in Pendleton, S.C., suggested highlighting the importance of ongoing dialogue: “Communication with our liaisons and doing collection analysis on an ongoing basis are always important,” he said. These connections help librarians understand faculty and student needs and build support for library initiatives across campus.

2. Embracing Technological Evolution

Technology adoption represents both a challenge and an opportunity for community college libraries. Mosher described his library’s focus on enhancing user experience: “We have been interested in looking at ways to improve our discovery through our discovery tool and upgrading our website.” These upgrades are effective investments since a library’s digital presence often serves as students’ primary gateway to resources.

Meanwhile, Cross emphasized the importance of testing various emerging technologies, explaining: “Our vendors keep coming out with new applications, and we want to know how those are used before we make them live, because we want to be able to communicate best practices with our students.” This proactive approach allows libraries to be confident that new tools will enhance their users’ experience, and strategically investing in digital resources with unlimited user access maximizes their reach. 

The challenge of staying ahead of technology trends can be compounded by the need to provide accessibility and usability for students with varying levels of digital literacy. Taking advantage of training sessions and other resources vendors often offer, like the free resource LibKey Nomad, is a great way to stay ahead of the game

While information literacy remains at the heart of community college libraries’ mission, their approaches to instruction are always evolving. 

3. Reimagining Information Literacy Instruction

According to Mosher, Normandale’s information literacy strategy depends on one-shot instruction sessions: “Sometimes we see classes multiple times for either an hour or two hours.” To set students up for success, we work with the professor to find out what the assignment is, and then we tailor our instruction directly to how to research for the assignment,” Mosher said. “If there’s time in class, I leave some open search time for the students to start doing their research.”

Webb measures the success of her information literacy instruction by quantitative measures, such as how many one-shot sessions a faculty member requests, but she also listens to word of mouth. “I'll overhear conversations or be in other committee meetings on campus and hear [a professor say] ‘Hey, you know, Alisha was in my class the other day, and she really helped my students.’”

Mosher noted that student assessment of an “intro to college class” prompted a redesign of its information literacy lesson from a general overview into a library scavenger hunt that’s engaging, active, and fosters student discovery of different library materials and resource types. 

4. Maximizing Resources Through Professional Networks & Strategic Partnerships

Budget constraints represent a perennial challenge for community college libraries. All three libraries use consortia relationships to, as Cross put it, “get a little bit better pricing on some of our resources, and we’re able to communicate with some of our other partners in that consortium and find out how they enjoy the resources.” 

Librarians also expand their professional networks by attending library conferences, webinars, or joining professional organizations to exchange insights and strategies with their colleagues, and by working with vendors to explore flexible pricing models and new content offerings.

All three librarians also agreed on the importance of forming strategic partnerships within their colleges by reviewing resources to make sure they align with curriculum needs. Cross recalled how the college’s library recently conducted what they called the Collection Analysis Project to uncover savings on underutilized resources. “The goal was to map our electronic resources to the curriculum,” Cross said. “We also wanted to find out where the gaps exist. From that, we were able to do a cost-per-use analysis. A fourth phase of the project boiled down to faculty focus and collaboration.” 

In this time of technological and budgetary flux, librarians are using these four strategies to reinforce their central role in community colleges. As Cross concluded: “A very strong piece of our collection development is our liaison program, and the goal of the Collection Analysis Project was to ensure the resources that we provide meet the needs of the students and the instructional faculty.”

Roger Strong, Jr. is the Vice President of Gale Global Academic Sales. You can reach him via LinkedIn.