CPERS Site Visits

In March 2014, CPERS traveled north for two site visits to Anoka-Ramsey Community College in Coon Rapids and Anoka Technical College in Anoka. Site visits are a great way for us to meet folks we’ve been emailing (or read about) and have never met; observe the “front lines” of our libraries in action; and see the collections and spaces that inform how libraries operate.  See the Minitex Facebook page for more photos. For this set of visits, the librarians from the two libraries also joined CPERS staff to visit each other’s libraries. Here are some fun facts we learned on our tours: *The highest demand time for the student study spaces at Anoka-Ramsey Community College, Coon Rapids, is between 9am and 2pm. We’re guessing not all those students are in a rush to use the bone collection, but we had fun with it. *The Anoka-Ramsey Community College library is full of art. A retired faculty member buys the art that an art committee then carefully places all around the library. *The Anoka Technical Library has a room for reserve textbooks, which is a huge boon to students who for one reason or another – often beyond their control – haven’t gotten their own copies. (Please note the Minitex tub that made its way into the picture. We saw these at all the libraries we visited!) *The Anoka-Ramsey Community College Men's Basketball team finished sixth in the NJCAA Division III National Tournament in March at Sullivan County Community College in Loch Sheldrake, NY. *There is a safe room in the library at Anoka Technical College, so not only is it a very inviting place to work and study (with many appealing touches such as wood shelf ends, colorful displays, etc.), it’s also one of the safest places on campus! We also headed south to see the results of the huge renovation that the library at Inver Hills Community College undertook last summer. Last time we were there, the plans were only on paper: Now the library looks like this (and that’s our tour guide, Ann Schroder, in yellow at the reference desk): The stacks feature LED lighting on timers as well as very cool sliding reference shelves. The library features bright, multi-colored chairs and footstools to add pops of color to the largely gray palette. We also paid a first visit to Ben Tri at the St. Paul College Learning Commons. St. Paul College looks much bigger from the Marshall side than from the I-94 side! His space too had been renovated over the summer. It features a huge wall of glass that looks out onto a large open area full of computers and a fantastic view of St. Paul. We were amused to learn that of the two student study rooms, the students prefer the windowless one, as they feel less distracted without the windows. Ben has instituted an iPad loaner program with 10 iPads that has proven popular enough that he is expanding it to other devices in the near future.