Bird's Eye View December 2024

Bird's Eye View

December 2024

In this issue of the Bird’s Eye View, you’ll hear about event highlights from the Fall semester as well as some exciting updates to the library’s collections and instructional materials.

Coming Soon th the BC Library!

We're inviting our valued faculty to be part of this important initiative due to your invaluable subject expertise. Very soon, your department chairs will start receiving emails from BC librarians asking for department faculty's input on the section of the collection that aligns with your department's discipline(s). We'll be sending out lists of books that we are looking to withdraw from our collection due to the following criteria:

• Irrelevancy to student needs as reflected in the College Catalog
• Unused by students (fewer than 3 circulations in the last 5 years)
• Advanced age (greater than 20 years old)
• Wear and tear on the books themselves (we will replace titles that are still relevant but worn out, e.g., Rachel Carson's Silent Spring).

While we will be using our expertise as librarians to identify lists of titles to consider for withdrawal, we will look to you as the subject experts in these fields to help us determine which of those titles are seminal to the field and/or still relevant to your curricula and should remain in the collection.

Stay tuned for more details on how you can participate in this project, including a Spring 24 Flex workshop with more information, and thank you in advance: your involvement will make a significant difference in shaping the future of our library!

Romanian Librarians Tour the BC Library

The Friendship Force of Kern County hosted a hush of librarians this fall! These library workers hail from Romania and are doing exciting work in their country to bring literacy and informal education to their libraries. The group toured a wide array of libraries in Kern County and beyond- from the Shafter Library and Learning Center to the Los Angeles Public Library. We here at the Grace Van Dyke Bird Library were proud to receive them and discuss current issues around libraries nationally and were joined by a special guest:  former congressman and Kern Community College trustee Bill Thomas! The conversation took place in Thomas’ namesake room in the library.

Now if only the BC librarians could return the favor and travel to Romania for a whirlwind library adventure!

A Book Talk with Oliver Rosales in Delano

On October 23, the BC Cultural Historical Awareness Program (C.H.A.P.) hosted a book talk for Professor of History Oliver Rosales at the BC Delano Library to celebrate Professor Rosales' newly released Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multicultural Activism in the Central Valley. We and the 70+ students in attendance were thrilled to congratulate Professor Rosales on his book release and to hear him speak on the research and work he did to complete this project.

Pretty as a Picture Book: A Refresher on Our Children's Collection

Thanks to collaboration with the Child Development department, the library now boasts an updated children’s picture book collection! For this development, we focused on books with themes like health and wellness, social emotional learning, and diversity. We are proud to put these titles, many of which are award-winning, on our shelves and add them to an already robust collection.

Any member of the BC community can check out these books- whether it’s for a child development course, to read to the children in your life, or just for a walk down memory lane. They live on the 2nd floor of the library only a few feet past the reference desk and would be happy to be read by you!

Library Research Skills Canvas Modules Updated for Accessibility

Did you know the librarians create modules for library research skills that you can import from Canvas Commons into your course shells? You can look at all of our modules by searching “Bakersfield College Library” in Canvas Commons. We have modules for each of our Library Workshop topics, as well as tutorials for evaluating with the DAPPR Test Rubric and citing in either APA or MLA. Modules contain quizzes that will enter a score in your gradebook. We are updating all of the modules for accessibility. They will be ready by the end of this fall semester in time to import into your spring semester courses.

Please note: If you already use our modules, the new modules will not trigger an update notice because we had to change our process for uploading to the Commons. You will need to delete any previous library modules from your course and import the new ones to your courses.