Library Services During COVID-19

Librarians and staff at Falcone welcome returning students, staff, and faculty to campus for Fall semester. We hope everyone has a happy, productive, and safe year at Le Moyne College. We’ve put together a Library Services During COVID-19 guide to help you locate changes and enhancements to Library services. 

Here are a few important things to know about as the new semester starts.

Falcone Library reopened on August 13th and, with some exceptions, will follow similar hours of operation as previous years. Library collections are open for browsing all hours the library is open. In order to enter the building you will need to swipe in using your Le Moyne ID. You are expected to wear a face covering while you are in the building, to practice social distancing, and be prepared to show a green badge on your emocha app. Due to the current situation, we are unable to open our building to those who are not current students, faculty, or staff of Le Moyne College. 

The library has created special hours designated for vulnerable/concerned patrons. The library will be accessible to this group 20 minutes prior to general opening Monday–Friday using cardkey swipe access. In order to request this swipe access, please contact Lisa Chaudhuri <doylel@lemoyne.edu>. We’ve also launched a new service called Paging & Pickup where patrons can place holds on materials through the catalog and retrieve them at the Library Services Desk.

In person reference services are available at the Library Service Desk during all hours of operation. Research consultations and in depth reference questions are best directed to our on call librarian. You can get in contact with the on call librarian by chat, email, or text. In addition, appointments are available with librarians using Zoom, Google Hangouts or by phone. The library also has a number of resources to assist faculty, especially those who are teaching online in the fall. Le Moyne Librarians are prepared to provide library instruction in a variety of formats including in person, virtual (synchronous or asynchronous), and other modes as requested.

Library Web Site Reorganization

Falcone Library reorganized its website over the summer with the hope of making it easier for our users to find library research materials. During the forced closure this past spring and summer, many students, working from off-campus, struggled to locate the online materials they needed for their coursework. That became a major point of focus for the Library’s redesign work. 

There are two main changes you will see, as well as a number of other smaller details that you might not notice at first. First, we combined the former “Find Books” and “Find Articles” categories in the navigation menus at the top of Library web pages into a single “Search Collections” menu. We saw that library users were not looking for just books and journal articles; they also needed to be able to find non-traditional materials, especially electronic books (ebooks) and streaming videos. 

The second change to the site is a reorganization of the tabs on the homepage. In our new approach, we wanted to focus on the different ways that you can search Library collections. Each tab highlights a different material type and provides a search box that is optimized for that material. For example, under “Find Films”, we recognized that some students are looking for streaming videos to watch as a class assignment while others are looking for DVDs to take back to their rooms to watch as entertainment. The new search boxes are designed to make those kinds of distinctions easier.

We recognize that this work was done without the benefit of being able to talk to Library users and we accept that some of the changes might be a little jarring at first if you remember how the site worked before. Please send your feedback to the Library Web Committee.