By: Trish Ingleson
Regardless of the fact that more and more information is becoming available online these days, there is no sign of a decrease in library usage at Algonquin. In fact, our Learning Resource Centre is as busy as ever.
Brenda Mahoney, a librarian at the college since 1997, says that Woodroffe campus lends out a consistent 3,000 to 4,000 physical items every month, with thousands of hits off-site for the online journal articles, magazines and newspapers that the LRC database offers.
“We’ve become increasingly technical. We’ve gone from books, to incredibly technically dependent.”
The increasing popularity is due to a drastic increase in online resources. According to librarian Maureen Sheppard, the college has over 25,000 e-books and another 30,000 government publications and reports, with 5,000 titles added to the collection in the last month alone.
With half of the LRC’s budget now going towards online resources and e-books being so quickly and easily added into the system and shared amongst Algonquin’s three campuses, most of the library’s products will work on smart phones and i-pads.
Mahoney doesn’t see this dying down anytime soon, “Definitely we’ll see more online materials and that’s great for a digital college. It supports the digital programs, the mobile programs, the online students, and they get equal access to the library.”
The problem with all of the online resources is that they are leased from various databases. “Tomorrow if we got our budget cut, it would all disappear, it’s all subscriptions,” said Mahoney.
So, the LRC has to keep a careful eye on the amount of use versus the cost and prove what is needed every year, while Algonquin students continue to embrace a technological learning style.