Indiana University South Bend is a regional campus of the eight campus, 100,000-student Indiana University system. The campus’ and Library’s relationship to the University system has evolved as the campus has grown and developed into a regional university from a university extension center. The Franklin D. Schurz Library provides a variety of instruction and reference services as a result of long term commitment by administrators and library faculty to provide up-to-date, high quality services. The core of the instruction program is a required undergraduate credit-bearing information literacy course. Budgetary and staffing constraints are faced, as they are in many academic libraries.
TopObjectives Of The Chapter
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The reader will recognize the incremental steps taken in the instruction and reference services offered in Franklin D. Schurz Library to develop comprehensive services in both areas.
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The reader will view assessment of instruction services as distinct from student evaluation or informal feedback.
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The reader will identify influences of a credit-bearing information literacy course on the overall instruction program and reference services.
TopOrganizational Background
Indiana University South Bend is a growing regional campus of Indiana University, serving approximately 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students in north central Indiana. It began as an extension of Indiana University in 1933, teaching classes in a local high school, and gained its own campus in 1961 with a single building on the St. Joseph River in South Bend. The campus granted its first degrees in 1965 (Furlong, 2013). The campus currently has the library, a student activity center, an administration building, four classroom buildings and a fifth classroom building under construction on a central landscaped mall, and student housing across the river.
IU South Bend now offers over 100 bachelor’s degrees in the College of Library Arts & Sciences, Ernestine M. Raclin School of the Arts, the School of Business & Economics, the School of Education, the College of Health Sciences, the Division of Labor Studies, and a Purdue University School of Technology. Master’s programs include accounting, mathematics, computer science and information technologies, English, business, education, music, nursing, public affairs, and social work. There are now about 300 full-time, tenure-track faculty and nearly as many part-time, non-tenure track faculty. Off-site classes are offered in nearby Elkhart, Indiana, and online classes are offered in many programs. Although housing is available for 400 students, the campus is mainly a commuter campus. (Indiana University South Bend, 2013).The majority of the undergraduate student body is full-time, first generation college students, and the campus offers over 100 student clubs, organizations and activities. Strong administrative ties exist to the eight-campus Indiana University system, but the exact nature of those ties changes with University administrations. Campus budgets, including library budgets, are independent of each other, although consortial-like pricing is often available to all University campuses through the efforts of librarians on the main campus in Bloomington, Indiana. Although a single catalog, IUCAT, serves all campus and affiliate libraries (47 libraries are listed in the catalog), no cooperative collection development agreement exists for general collections. Technical services on all campuses enjoy services provided by the librarians in Bloomington, such as acquisitions and ordering for many materials, but no formal cooperative agreements for providing public services university-wide are currently in place. At one time, a librarian on the Bloomington campus was designated as the liaison to regional campus libraries, and that Bloomington librarian was the one to whom reference questions were referred if a regional campus library did not have the resources to answer them. With the proliferation of online resources and the growth and development of regional campus libraries, that service was rarely used and the designation of a liaison has discontinued. The continued development of IUCAT is the primary university-wide activity of librarians in the Indiana University system.