By Victoria Durgin, Editor in Chief
The Blough Weis library is gearing up for another academic year with their annual open house event.
The open house will take place on Wednesday, Sept. 8 from 1-5 p.m.
According to information provided by Research Librarian Ryan Ake, the event is a scavenger-hunt style tour across the library. Students will be able to learn more about services offered by librarians, including research help, and can familiarize themselves with the layout of the building.
Library staff hope the event will show new and returning students how useful the library can be to them during their time at Susquehanna and after graduation.
“Events like this reinforce the importance of the library in their academic, professional and civic roles for years to come,” a release from the library stated.
Grand prizes at the event include Apple AirPods and $100 gift cards to the campus bookstore and Amazon, according to Ake.
In addition to the open house, the library has also announced an expansion of a free textbook program open to all students.
The Textbook Reserve program launched during the spring 2021 semester and aims to address the financial hardship textbook prices bring, according to Ake.
“Textbook costs have been soaring for decades, rising far faster than the rate of inflation or even tuition,” Ake said, “They are sometimes so expensive that students do not purchase required textbooks.”
The reserves program was introduced to supplement the library’s push for faculty to include open educational resources (OER) in their curriculum.
(Read more: Blough Weis Library pushes for open textbook use.)
OERs provide solid information to students, but as Ake said, they do not always cover all the material faculty wish to include in their courses.
To supplement this gap, the library partnered with the Student Government Association (SGA) for assistance in securing a variety of assigned textbooks.
“SGA is super excited to have partnered with the library on the textbook reserve program,” SGA President Ivan Zaw said.
“We teamed up with the Blough-Weis Library to provide free access to SU’s most frequently utilized textbooks, in hopes of alleviating any burdens that access to textbooks maybe causing to the student body. We are planning to continue this program in the upcoming years and expand our collection to include more textbooks that are commonly being used in Susquehanna’s classes.”
There are currently required resources for 79 courses offered this fall available in the library. Students in these courses are able to check out their textbooks the same way they would loan any other item in the library.
To view the list of which courses have resources available, students can go to the reserves listing on the Blough Weis library’s website.
