Davidson-Reaffirmation of Accreditation

Compliance
Certification
Core Requirements
2.1 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 2.7.1 | 2.7.2 | 2.7.3 | 2.7.4 | 2.8 | 2.9 | 2.10 | 2.11

Quality Enhancement Plan
2.12

Comprehensive Standards
3.1.1 (Mission)

3.2.1 | 3.2.2 | 3.2.3 | 3.2.4 | 3.2.5 | 3.2.6 | 3.2.7 | 3.2.8 | 3.2.9 | 3.2.10 | 3.2.11 | 3.2.12 | 3.2.13 | 3.2.14 (Admin.)

3.3.1 (Effectiveness)

3.4.1 | 3.4.2 | 3.4.3 | 3.4.4 | 3.4.5 | 3.4.6 | 3.4.7 | 3.4.8 | 3.4.9 | 3.4.10 | 3.4.11 | 3.4.12 | 3.4.13 | 3.4.14 (Educational Program)

3.5.1 | 3.5.2 (Undergraduate Program)

3.7.1 | 3.7.2 | 3.7.3 | 3.7.4 | 3.7.5 (Faculty)

3.8.1 | 3.8.2 | 3.8.3 (Library)

3.9.1 | 3.9.2 | 3.9.3 (Students)

3.10.1 | 3.10.2 | 3.10.3 | 3.10.4 | 3.10.5 | 3.10.6 | 3.10.7 (Resources)

Federal Requirements
4.1 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.8

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Compliance Certification Report

Core Requirement 2.9 - Learning and information resources and services

The institution, through ownership or formal arrangements or agreements, provides and supports student and faculty access and user privileges to adequate library collections as well as to other learning/information resources consistent with the degrees offered. These collections and resources are sufficient to support all its educational, research, and public service programs.

Judgment of Compliance

Davidson College is in compliance with Core Requirement 2.9.

Rationale for Judgment of Compliance

The E. H. Little Library at Davidson College is 100,000 square feet in size, on three floors, centrally located near both the main academic building and the Alvarez College Union. The Library is accessible to users with disabilities, and sees some 1,000 people enter through its doors each day. Built in 1974, the building contains seating for 650—over one-third of the student body—in the form of individual chairs, work tables, study/listening rooms, and a 24-hour study room. Student study carrels line the walls, and 39 faculty research carrels serve current and emeriti faculty. The entire building has wireless capabilities, and port connections to the campus network are available throughout. There are approximately 50 freestanding public computer terminals in the building. The College’s recent capital campaign has resulted in funds being earmarked for the refurbishing of the Library facility as well as the creation of additional shelving space for the collection, either as an addition to the present facility or an off-site storage arrangement.

The library collection currently stands at over 600,000 volumes, with approximately 80,000 items checked out each year. With a materials budget of over $1.5 million for academic year 2005-06 (a five percent increase over the previous year), the library is able to add approximately 10,000 volumes each year, maintain membership in NC-LIVE, and renew subscriptions to periodicals and to online resources such as J-STOR, ArtSTOR, and Project Muse.

Faculty members participate actively in the development of the collection. The Faculty Library Committee allocates 60 percent of the materials budget to individual academic departments and programs, which in turn are responsible for selecting materials to support their course offerings. Faculty members’ responsibility for collection development in their areas is a constitutional requirement, and the Dean of Faculty may request from the Director of the Library a report for each faculty member being considered for contract renewal or for tenure. As a way to encourage new faculty to become engaged in collection building, the Library has established a new faculty fund to be tapped during a faculty member’s first year at Davidson.

Interlibrary loan services are state-of-the-art and heavily used by faculty and students. Some 20,000 transactions are recorded each year. Most non-book requests are delivered electronically via password-protected Web sites. Another service appreciated by faculty and students alike is the system of electronic course reserves for both print materials and digitized sound files, with uses totaling over 100,000 hits per year.

Little Library is open for a total of 106 hours per week, with reference services offered during 71.5 of those hours. A reference librarian is also on duty in the Music Library most days and one evening per week. One of the Library’s 11 librarians holds office hours in the science building two afternoons per week. The College Archives are open every day and one evening a week, with reference service offered by the librarian in charge of that department. Upon request by faculty members, classes are offered for students in various academic departments using the resources of the archives. Usage statistics for the Library's reference services can be found here.

The Library staff, often in collaboration with the faculty, facilitates student access to both print and electronic learning resources. Library instruction is an integral part of the Library’s mission and has grown over recent years. A $250,000 electronic classroom containing 21 terminals and electronic controls was added in 2003, enabling the Library’s four Public Service librarians to conduct over 100 classes each year in the use of Library resources. Each class is tailored to reflect the focus of an individual course and may address specific topics requested by faculty members. A research guide is provided for students on the Library’s Web site. Follow-up sessions with faculty members are used to determine effectiveness of these sessions and refinements are made based on these evaluations for future classes. In addition to these group sessions, individual research consultations are offered by many of the librarians. They are scheduled via the Library’s Web page and can last from 30-60 minutes. To meet the needs of first-year students, a 90-minute library introduction section is included in Davidson 101, the multifaceted orientation course that all first-year students must complete in the fall semester. Nearly all of the librarians participate in this low-key but carefully crafted presentation that introduces first-year students to the arrangement of information resources in the library—print, non-print, on-line—how to select the most appropriate one, and how to evaluate the legitimacy of each. By the end of the third week of classes, all but a handful of the approximately 460 first-year students participate in this presentation. As is the case for course-specific classes described above, feedback is solicited from students and faculty alike following the sessions, so that teaching methods may be evaluated and improved for future classes. The usage statistics for these programs can be found here.

In the realm of electronic resources, the Library supports teaching at Davidson in the following ways:

Web-based, course-related research guides created at the request of faculty members and designed for specific classes and assignments; the guides, which contain numerous links to electronic resources, are accessible from the Library Web site, and faculty members can also link to them from within Blackboard or from faculty-created Web pages. For details on the product, see the Library's Course Research Guides .
RefWorks, a Web-based bibliographic management product recently acquired by the Library. The “RefShare” feature has been particularly popular with faculty. Faculty members are already using RefWorks to share information with their students; several are also having their students work as a group to create bibliographies of references within RefWorks (in class and outside of class). More details on RefWorks can be found here.
ARTstor, a database of over 300,000 images of works of art. Faculty are using ARTstor image groups (with editable fields), the offline image viewer (which allows faculty members to display digital images as a slide show or dual slide show), and the option to upload personal images and add them to image groups.
Electronic resources (e-journals, e-books, full-text databases with persistent URL's for linking from Web pages or Blackboard, online government documents, material from the archives) that can be retrieved, examined, and discussed in classes; faculty are increasingly showing these resources to students during class times. The Library is actively expanding its digital collections to support teaching in this way.
The College Archives’ student Web pages and “Davidson Encyclopedia,” both created and updated by successive classes of students; these sources provide a context and location for classes working with primary materials.
The Library's proxy server, which allows Davidson students and faculty to access electronic resources from off campus. The proxy server supports off-campus programs, such as the study abroad programs.
Library scanning services and publicly-accessible scanners (including the digital microform scanners) that faculty can use to digitize images to share with their students.
Assistive technology for students, faculty, and staff with vision impairments, physical disabilities, and learning disabilities. Two workstations in the Library enable students to study and review course information. For details, see the Library's Services for Students with Disabilities page.

The Library supports the Music and Chemistry Libraries, both of which provide access to learning and information resources appropriate for their respective disciplines. At the three on-campus sites, faculty and librarians work collaboratively and in an atmosphere of mutual respect to maximize learning opportunities for Davidson students as well as teaching/research opportunities for faculty. The involvement of faculty in shaping library collections and resources is significant and speaks to the responsiveness of the Library staff.

In addition to the three facilities maintained by the Library, three sites are operated by Information Technology Services: the Language Resource Center (LRC); the Center for Instructional Technology (CIT); and the Digital Media Lab. Information Technology Services (ITS) is the umbrella organization for information technology, and faculty and student access to learning and information resources, at Davidson College. Within that organization the Instructional Technology Group (ITG) supports and encourages faculty and students by providing access to appropriate resources.

Approximately 95-98 percent of Davidson students bring computers to campus. ITS employs and trains a group of tech-savvy students to provide support to students in the residence halls. The residential computer services they provide are colloquially known as ResNet. Many students access the library resources and other Web resources from their rooms.

ITS provides computing labs and classrooms to assist the instructional programs of the College and to provide access to learning and information resources. These facilities are available to all Davidson faculty and currently enrolled students. There is a 24-hour lab in Belk Residence Hall where the ResNet team has an office and is available to provide technical assistance from 7:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m. Sunday through Thursday. The Student Computing Lab in the Belk Residence Hall contains nine Dell SX280s, 35 Dell SX270s, 11 Macintosh Power Mac G5s, scanners, and laser printers. There is a public lab for the students in the Library that contains eight Dell SX270s and two Macintosh Power Mac G5s. These rooms are staffed at various hours to provide help to students. Students and faculty may also call the ITS Help Desk during regular working hours for assistance.

ITG runs the Center for Instructional Technology. The Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) is dedicated to faculty development work in all disciplines. All of the tools are available that are needed to create a variety of digital materials, from scanning to rich media. The center consists of high-end Mac and PC machines, region-free DVD and VHS players, media converters, scanners, DVD burners and label makers, color printing, plotter printing, and a wide range of low to high end video, still photo and audio equipment. An extension of the CIT, the Faculty Development Lab resides in the Watson science building to allow easier access for science faculty. For the language faculty and students, ITG maintains and supports the Language Resource Center (LRC). The LRC is both a lab and a smart classroom, containing 21 computers and providing students and faculty with services for foreign language video, audio, and computer-based activities. In this space, we support the use of technology to enhance foreign language teaching and learning. For Film and Media Studies, ITG manages and maintains the Connolly Digital Media Lab, a post-production space for editing on a variety of applications.

Supporting Documentation

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