Appalachian State University Libraries Transforms

Appalachian State University Libraries Transforms Create, Collaborate, Communicate

The Appalachian State University Libraries cultivate an environment where people discover, create, and share information that reflects the acquisition of 21st century knowledge skills. We are active partners in advancing the University’s principles of sustainability, social justice, inclusion, and global citizenship.

The library was visited over 1.1 million times last year by students, faculty, staff and community members. On average, the library is open 137 hours per week.

The ASU Main Stacks are on the second and third floors, and the Browsing Collection and the Film Collection are on the first. And through the web, the library offers journals from the ABA Banking Journal to Zeitschrift für Psychologie (Journal of Psychology).

The library has a dedicated group of student workers who shelve approximately 14,000 items on a monthly basis.

The ABC Express is a delivery service operated by the Western North Carolina Library Network of Appalachian State University, UNC-Asheville and Western Carolina University.

In 2017, a total of 5,339 items were circulated between the libraries at App State, WCU, and UNCA. App State loaned 3,363 items to WCU and UNCA and borrowed 1,976 items.

A dedicated group of full-time personnel and student workers perform a variety of tasks related to facilities management such as shipping and receiving, emptying remote book drops three times per week, repairing furniture, painting walls, and setting up seating arrangements for meetings.

The IMC is a pre-K–12 resource for pre-service teachers and educators. Over 53,000 items are available including literature, models, STEM and STEAM kits, games, curriculum/lesson planning ideas, technology, and more!

Education students and local educators can also use the Idea Factory, a media production facility.

The Request It! service allows patrons to have items at ASU Library pulled and placed “On Hold” at the Library Service Desk. Between August and December 2017, 2,097 material requests were filled for the Request It! Service. 1,065 items were sent to faculty departments. The top three departments using faculty delivery service are Languages, Literatures and Cultures (188), Art (132), English (125).

More than 2,200 first-year students completed online information literacy modules.

Belk librarians support the research needs of students and faculty on a regular basis. In 2017, librarians conducted 454 research consultations and answered 1,930 virtual reference questions.

Members of the Learning and Research Services Team staff the Library Services Desk for a total of 109 hours per week. Between August and December 2017, team members answered over 14,000 questions.

The Resource Acquisition and Management (RAM) team works behind the scenes, supporting all areas of the library.

They purchase resources; ensure access and retrieval for electronic, digital, and physical materials throughout the library; repair books; and enable you to borrow materials from other libraries.

The Nicholas Erneston Music Library, located on the second floor of the Broyhill Music Center, supports the curriculum of the Mariam Cannon Hayes School of Music.

The Music Library Collection includes print and electronic scores, music notation software, the PED wireless foot controller, complete works of famous composers, DVDs, streaming audio and video and much, much more.

Digital Scholarship and Initiatives (DSI) engages and partners with Appalachian faculty members, students, library colleagues, and the community to support new scholarship in a rapidly changing digital landscape. DSI provides and sustains innovative digital tools and publishing platforms for content delivery, discovery, analysis, data curation, and preservation. We can digitize all paper formats and 25 analog audio and video formats. We also preserve data sets, create digital collections, and provide copyright and scholarly communications guidance.

Special Collections, located on the fourth floor of the Belk Library and Information Commons, is home to books, manuscripts, and artifacts about the Appalachian region, the University’s history, stock car racing, and British history, as well as many other topics.

The Appalachian Collection is one of the largest repositories of material related to the Southern Uplands and Native Appalachia, with strengths in the social sciences, regional history, folklore, music, religion, genealogy, and fiction.

You will find books, rare books and manuscripts, journals, sound recordings, films, newspapers, maps, and a clippings file going back to the 1960’s.

What is a stock car? Visit the Stock Car Racing Collection to find out. The collection contains all types of materials that document the sport, including books, racing magazines, clippings, photographs, programs, posters, audio- and videotapes, promotional materials, and more.

The Belk Library Print Zone is the busiest printing operation on campus. The Print Zone is staffed 90 hours per week by student workers and a full-time technology support technician. Other services provided in the Print Zone include software and hardware troubleshooting, scanning, and copying. Other services in the Print Zone include software and hardware troubleshooting, scanning, copying, and résumé printing.

The Tech Desk offers patrons a wide variety of technology equipment available for checkout. All the necessary equipment needed to create an audio or video project for a class assignment can be checked out, along with electronics and computer programming kits such as the Raspberry Pi and Arduino.

The Inspire Maker Lab houses a variety of technologies that can help students, faculty, and staff create their projects. The makerspace has hosted different classes from all over campus and has had projects created using our equipment for 35 distinct classes. 3D printing and virtual reality continue to be the most popular attractions within the space, with the 3D printers working to print over 250 prints in the 2017–2018 academic year so far. The Game Development Room has been booked 335 times since the school year began and visited by over a dozen classes. Our other equipment including electronics, soldering, a CNC router, vinyl cutters, and a sewing machine have been used by hundreds of App State users since the space opened in January 2017.

The purpose of the Digital Media Studio is to provide access to current software and hardware, but most of all we provide help using digital media tools and technologies, including video, image, and audio creation and editing. We support an average of 17,000 patrons per semester in creation of multimedia projects. We also offer an Audio Recording Room and a Video Recording Room for multimedia creation.

The Administrative Services team provides support to all library teams and personnel and includes organizational development, programming and event planning, business services, accounting, student hiring, and our leadership team, the Dean and Associate Dean.

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