The semester just ended at NJIT. All of a sudden the campus is empty with just some diligent graduate students using the library. Many international students do not return to their native countries and find the intersession period a fruitful time to do their research. We even get one or two complaints that the library will be closed from December 24 – January 2.
I have now worked at the NJIT library for 37 semesters plus summers. We don’t keep reference statistics but anecdotally the number of transactions at the traditional reference desk plummeted this semester. There has been a downward trend over recent years, but the interactions at the desk were very low. Most of my “business” is from people who know me or are referred by faculty. It may mean that researchers are learning to use databases by themselves. The statistics for Scifinder Scholar show 800-1000 searchers per month, but so few ask me for assistance. My statistics for this database indicates that approximately half the searches are done using the desktop version which will cease at the end of June 2011. I keep advising people of this and encouraging them to move to the web version, but inevitably people will ask me “What happened to Scifinder” when they can’t access the client version next July.
From now until the beginning of the spring semester I will spend time catching up on some low priority projects. I will go to the VALE annual meeting on June 5th and the METRO Science Librarians SIG on January 10.
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