Slides for a virtual talk I gave for the ACRL Arts sections. You can find the actual archived talk on the ACRL site.

1. Distance Education and
the Art and Design
School Library
January 30, 2013
Sarah Falls, Director of the Library, NY School of Interior Design

2. The Design School Library and Distance
Education
 We are not Stanford, our distance education will be very
different from Coursera
 Library Roles
 Content provider and repository
 Support component in reference
 Instruction/Information and Visual Literacy
 Increased virtual outreach

3. NYSID to begin distance programs in March
 Background, NYSID offered correspondence courses until the
early „80s
 First distance offering will be non-credit bearing
 Next is the BID, 18 credit program added, mixing gen-
eds, design history and studio courses
 Big overall question: How do we teach studios (i.e. replicate
the one-on-one feel?)
 Big library questions: How do we collect, index and maintain
complex digital learning objects created in distance ed.
programs? How do we get faculty away from cloud solutions
when they are not connected physically to campus? How do
we support our students and faculty who are at a distance?
How do we synch tools such as ARTstor to new types of
learning management systems?

4. Library Roles: Content
 Add more full text content
 More electronic reserves content
 Make document delivery available through scanning at
NYSID library and NYU Interlibrary loan
 Create content that is needed (still images)
 Maintain content for the long-term and migrate it as
systems change to prevent obsolescence (develop robust
repository and workflows for inception)
 Work with new media types, including
video and audio for new types of
instructional content

5. Library Roles: Support
 More new videos on how to do things library and information
related, such as scanning drawings, scaling in Photoshop, how to
use the tools in databases, how to construct PPT‟s, PDF‟s and
other media types
 More means of communication for instant help. Chat, IM, email,
phone. Better scripts for answering questions, better training
for students workers
 Better website FAQ‟s and documentation where faculty
members can grab it quickly and add it to sites, or point
students to it
 We will need to develop a mobile site and strengthen our own
to work in lots of tech environments
 Library may be a pass through for IT problems and increase
volume of calls/emails. Library employees must be better able
to unravel technology inquiries. Students won‟t know where IT
ends and library begins, we have to guide them

6. Library Roles: Instruction
 Library must do more instruction from afar, at a much more granular level
(instruction may be more embedded in reference)
 Will need to use new tools for instruction that are more dynamic (i.e. sites
rather than static pdf‟s)
 Will need to provide asynchronous and synchronous instruction for classes
and individuals and use more video components
 Will need to provide virtual reference appointments for students via Skype
and other tools
 Will need to instruct students how to pull all of their resources together
so that the research environment is seamless, as if they are on campus. A
marriage of NYSID online resources, document delivery from NYSID and
NYU, local public library ILL book services and use of Worldcat to see
what‟s in their backyard. International students will be the hardest to work
with in terms of the local environment
 Librarians become “digital sherpas”
 Library becomes ubiquitous

7. New forms of outreach
 More communication from the library in very structured
ways
 Open more social media channels
 Beyond the “traditional” social media tools like Facebook
and Twitter, look at visual platforms like
Pinterest, Instagram and others

8. Early stages of assessment, but…
 How will we assess our performance?
 Make sure that library centric questions are included in course
evaluations that address content availability and service
 Monitor the types of questions that are being asked to better
hone FAQ‟s and documentation
 Monitor chat and other types of communication
 Keep good stats on social media and website usage
 Will be harder to assess use by these students of vendor
provided resources, but we can look at changes in overall
usage
 Virtual (anonymous) suggestion box
 Questions? Feel free to contact me: sfalls@nysid.edu