Getting Asked

We are a very small academic library, serving 1,450 FTE students, 85 faculty, and the occasional staff member. We have only have five librarians. It is a very good library, but we're very small with a budget to go along with the size.

But we also tend to be ahead of the curve on many items. While we do have a small budget, we also have a good relationship with our vendors, are happy to play the guinea pig for the vendors, and don't have the complex bureaucracy of a bigger library.

So it is wonderful when a library we look up to like Gettysburg comes up to one of us at a conference and asks us about something we're doing because they were thinking of doing it to. In this case, it was Aquabrowser, which we have been using for nearly two school years now, and other schools are just starting to jump on board. One of our librarians was also approached in the grocery store last week by a librarian from the local community college which has infinitely more resources than we do, and she was so impressed with our IM service and some other new things we were doing. Other libraries have started doing something similar to our Snowden 'til 2 program that we have the Friday night before finals with review sessions, music, games, pizza, pictures with Santa... all of which attracts 1/4 of our student body. It's just so great to be ahead of the curve by other people, especially the ones we look up to for ideas!