The Library exists to support student success, which we do, in part, through supporting the teaching and learning work of our faculty colleagues.
Putting items on reserve can ensure that required and recommended assignment materials are available to all students in your course. Reserve items can be in any format (book, DVD, model, etc.). Reserves are very popular with students, especially in the beginning of term when students may not have their textbooks yet. Reserve items can be from the Library’s collections or an instructor’s personal copies; items obtained through interlibrary loan may not be put on reserve. When selecting a textbook, ask your rep for a student copy for library reserve — many publishers honor these requests.
To place materials on reserve, bring them to the Circulation Desk and fill out Library Reserve Request forms for each item. You may choose if items stay on reserve one semester or one academic year, if items may leave the library, and if items may be borrowed for 2 hours, 1 day, 2 days, or 7 days. If you have questions about reserves, contact the Circulation Desk.
Students may borrow reserves at the Circulation Desk using their Normandale IDs. Items are checked out on a first come, first-served basis and may be renewed once.
You can incorporate our physical collections into your courses in many ways. For example, some instructors have students find books on their topics (as part of a librarian-led class or separately), organize assignments around print journals or magazines, or borrow DVDs to show in class. With notice, librarians can curate course-specific book carts or lists to support an assignment. Search the full Library Catalog.
We have over 100 library databases with millions of journal, magazine, and newspaper articles, ebooks, videos, images, and other content. Databases are accessible from oon or ff campus using StarID. Many instructors have students use these databases in research assignments or make library-provided articles, ebooks, and videos part of assigned course content. Librarians can help you identify articles, ebooks, or videos that help meet your intended learning outcomes. Browse our library databases or learn how to link to library sources for successful off-campus access.
Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials that are free for you and your students to use. They can include lectures, assignments, quizzes, textbooks, and more. You can usually revise and edit them (if you wish) and adopt them in whole or in part. Open educational resources are a great way to reduce materials costs for students. Interested in adopting OER in your courses? Librarians can help you find OER in your discipline to investigate further. Contact librarian David Vrieze Daniels, our Creative Commons certified OER champion.
Each department has designated funds for library purchases and different internal procedures for deciding allocations. Please communicate purchasing requests to Acquisitions librarian Luke Mosher. Requests can be for any format — books and ebooks, journals and ejournals, physical and streaming audiovisual materials, kits and models, and online databases. Please allow at least 2 months for ordering and shipping plus additional time for cataloging and processing. Let Luke know if you have special requests such as orders intended for course reserves.
We have several tools to help you identify works to add to the library collections in your discipline. We recommend using Choice Reviews Online, which focuses on academic literature and includes a filter for items appropriate to community college collections. Other tools are Booklist Online for popular literature reviews and Books in Print for bibliographic information about books in and out of print.
It is good practice to consider copyright and fair use any time you use work created by others. We recommend Minnesota State’s copyright guidance documents, and we often consult with the Minnesota State System Director for Intellectual Property to answer your copyright questions. Faculty may find these guidelines and forms created by Minnesota State helpful:
Assign content from our online databases by linking. Uploading content directly into D2L (e.g., copy and paste, PDF files) may be a violation of database license agreements or copyright. Learn how to link to library sources or ask a librarian for help.
Librarians at Normandale are faculty. We teach information literacy and research strategies to students across disciplines.
We use a course-integrated approach to deliver face-to-face, synchronous Zoom, or asynchronous D2L lessons tailored to the specific course assignment and to where the students are in the research process when we see them. Librarians plan each lesson (and its associated learning outcomes) after consulting with you about the course assignment, your desired learning outcomes, the timing in the research process, and the constraints of the time period. Our lesson plans align to the standards for our field, the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (PDF). We can teach about all aspects of information literacy from research and evaluation strategies to understanding our broader information environment to habits of mind for research success.
Some examples of what we teach:
Most of our classes include assignment-related active learning components for students to experience researching in a supported environment. We make assignment-specific Research Guides that put recommended databases and other resources all in one place.
We partner with you to bring librarian-led instruction into your classes, and this can take many shapes. This isn’t one-size-fits-all library instruction. For example, we can teach for one class period related to one step in the research process of one assignment. We can teach multiple back-to-back periods, so we can scaffold several learning outcomes within the context of the same assignment. We can teach one class period related to an assignment early in the semester and teach another class period related to a later assignment. We can join your asynchronous class for a week with content modules and discussion boards.
We want you to understand the breadth and depth of what information literacy instruction from Library faculty (AKA librarians) can be, but sometimes the primary learning outcome is for students to meet a librarian and get to know us as approachable research experts available outside of class. That’s great, too!
To request library instruction in your courses, contact librarian David Vrieze Daniels, instruction program coordinator. We encourage you to get in touch with us as early as possible. At minimum, we require a full week’s prep time.
Librarians provide one-on-one research instruction to students to support real-time research tasks outside of class. Students can get guidance from us without an appointment in person at the Reference Desk, online through chat or email, and over the phone. Optionally, students may schedule an appointment with a librarian in person or on Zoom. Appointments are helpful for complex research projects or for students who want to continue working with a particular librarian.
Often, students are more comfortable visiting us at the Reference Desk after learning from us in class. In this way, classroom instruction often flows into individual instruction later.
Librarians are available to all students. Whether we have taught in your class or not, feel free to refer students who are struggling with the research process to us — even better, walk with them to the Reference Desk. If you would like to incorporate one-on-one library instruction into a research assignment, contact librarian and instruction program coordinator David Vrieze Daniels to discuss possibilities.
Are you contemplating a new research assignment and want someone to bounce ideas off of? Are you wanting to include library materials, library services, or library instruction into an assignment but aren’t sure how that would work? Do you have ideas for new kinds of collaborations with us? Do you want advice on creating effective research assignments? Do you want to brainstorm ways to address gaps you see in students’ information literacy or critical thinking skills? Or discuss your assignment’s research-related learning outcomes? Library faculty (AKA librarians) offer assignment consultations to our faculty colleagues.
Assignment consultation is a formal name for the informal conversations we have with faculty about current or future research assignments, learning outcomes, and information literacy pedagogy. Instruction librarians Lacey Mamak, Libby Merrill, Luke Mosher, and David Vrieze Daniels are all available to all faculty for assignment consultation. Contact us to schedule an appointment or stop by our offices. (If you do not have a preference, reach out to David Vrieze Daniels. He will meet with you or connect you to another librarian.)
Librarians offer support for some faculty research activities. For example, we can help identify or locate literature of interest when you are preparing a new course or assignment or preparing for a sabbatical project. Other examples include helping department workgroups find best practices literature to support updating department policies and identifying recent pedagogy research to inform department discussions about course learning outcomes and delivery modes. Faculty research requests can be time intensive. Please give us ample time to work with you and understand that our direct work with students comes first.
Librarians also support departments’ program accreditation needs. We prepare budget and collections reports to include in accreditation portfolios, and we can meet with a site visit team if requested.
The Library has a subscription to BrowZine, a journal browsing and alert service. BrowZine is available for all Normandale employees and students. You can use the BrowZine web app or download a BrowZine mobile app to your phone or tablet. (A link to the BrowZine web app is also on the Journal Title Search tab on our main page.)
Use BrowZine to browse academic journals by tables of contents and download articles. When you create an account in BrowZine, you can save journals to your virtual bookshelf. You can choose to receive in-app alerts or emails whenever a journal on your bookshelf has added new articles. In the mobile app, you can save article files to the My Articles folder for offline reading. Note: BrowZine does not include all journals we subscribe to. Where publishing agreements exist, BrowZine provides tables of contents for years 2005 and later.
Some databases offer custom alert services for saved searches or new journal issues if you create an account on the platform.
The Library offers a print periodical routing service for employees to regularly receive magazine and journal issues to their campus mailboxes. Any employee, regardless of department or discipline, can join the routing list for a periodical. Browse the list of routable titles and find out more about our periodical routing service.
As we catalog items, we post lists of newly available materials on our website and the Employee Exchange. We organize the report by library collection (Reference, General, Audiovisual, etc.) and arrange items within collections by Library of Congress call number. Reports include all physical items added to the Library in a given period. Due to technical limitations, only a select few ejournal and ebook titles are included. Take a look at recent reports of New Materials. Borrowing periods for employees vary by item type. See the table of library borrowing periods.
All current employees and students may make interlibrary loan requests for books or articles beyond the Library’s collection. Some faculty use our Joint Catalog of All MnPALS Libraries to find books within our library consortium for interlibrary loan. (A link to the joint catalog is also on the Books Only Search tab on our main page.) These books tend to arrive quickly, but you are not limited to this catalog. See our interlibrary loan page for more information.
top