Dear Graduate Center community,

As the fall semester begins, your library faculty and staff are excited to welcome you back to (virtual, for now) campus. We have been working hard since March to facilitate teaching, learning, and research even as we all continue to work remotely. We know you likely have questions and concerns about accessing the library during the ongoing building closure, so I wanted to share some updates as we head into what is sure to be an interesting time at the GC.

• We have focused our collection building efforts on the acquisition of electronic materials, adding hundreds of ebooks to our holdings since spring to support teaching and research. All requests for reserve books will be managed electronically for the fall and we encourage you to make use of this service. Want to add articles from the GC collections to your Blackboard course site? Learn how here.
• Interlibrary loan staff have processed thousands of requests since the building closure in March, and our success rate is only improving as libraries across the country and world re-open for limited onsite services. Need something? Request it here.
• Learn more about teaching and research online in our workshops, including introductions to the library, using Scrivener and Zotero to manage the writing and research process, and the basics of archival research. If our scheduled workshops don’t work for you, check out our online training videos. And reach out to your librarian subject specialist to learn more about conducting research in these unprecedented times.
• The all-online nature of teaching and research means lots of questions about copyright and fair use, digital scholarship tools and techniques, accessing and using online research data, open access publishing, and open educational resources. Please make use the deep expertise of our scholarly research services team.

We also know that, despite our every effort, the physical closure of the Mina Rees Library represents a significant hardship for research happening at the Graduate Center. We continue to actively plan for the resumption of onsite services in collaboration with our library colleagues across CUNY and in line with the building reactivation plans here at the GC. Our focus will be on maximizing access to as much as we can for as many as we can, and we will keep the community updated as we move forward. Please join me on the first Wednesday of every month at noon for a chat with the interim chief. Share your concerns and hear updates from us, starting next Wednesday, September 2nd–click here to register.

Emily Drabinski
Interim Chief Librarian

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