Finding a home for the ibrary skills class

This is after the fact but I'll give an accounting of it anyhow.  I may have told earlier what the set-up of the new library is like - we managed to bring over 9 public access computers. {go see Pannell_2010 on Flickr for the interim library set-up} since the entire room is onl 30 x 30 ft, we are not able to conduct our usual classes there.  I have to schedule a computer lab somewhere on campus.  At the beginning of the semester, usually through about mid-October, we have two to four per week usually during prime class time - 9am to Noon.  There are very few unoccupied classrooms with computers on this campus during prime time on Monday and Wednesday.  When the first instructor asked to have a class scheduled, I sent a message to all the academic deans inquiring as to the availaility of an open computer equipped classroom.  There happened to be two; one in the inner campus and one outside the campus circle.  We chose the inner building due to the time constraints of the faculty member whose class we were scheduling.  Unfortunately this room was only large enough to accomodate 1/2 the class at a time, making it necessary for us to split the class session over two days.

I had previously crafted an entry form so that faculty could go to the library website and submit their requests for classes to us electronicaly.  It is currently only available as a PDF file on the web so our reference tech fills out the form and emails it back to the faculty member when we confirm the date, time and location.

We have never had the use of a regular classroom, complete with data projection unit, before for our library skills class so we both went over the the room at the appointed time.  Her to conduct it, me to observe, critique and assist.  At the conclusion of the 50 minute session we discussed what sorts of changes would be required in our normal "spiel".  Some changes were necessary because of the straitened circumstances ot the library (practically no physical collection!) and some because of the configuration of the room and the addition of nifty resources we never had before.  I should state now that this will be the configuration of the classroom being added to the newly renovated library space when it comes online in 2010--yippee!!  Since the class was divided over a two day span, we did the same critique and assist thing at the other session, incorporating what we learned into that session.

We realized we still had many changes to make.  I am very much looking forward to our next library skills class.  We should have this routine just about right by the end of the semester!!!