CORPUS CHRISTI, TEXAS — During this COVID-19 pandemic, many libraries across the state, including Texas A&M Corpus Christi-University, have increased their efforts to make their digital collections as visible and accessible as possible.
To slow down the spread of COVID-19 and protect the University community, officials said its library is prepared to give students 24/7 access to online resources.
“So we were pretty well-positioned from a material standpoint. We, also for the past several years, have been moving a lot of our services to have virtual offerings. So for example; our ask-us desk, where students can get research help, has phone-in, email, chat, and text services,” said Dean of Libraries Cate Rudowsky.
The University has refocused its collection development efforts to provide access to more digital content.
“Pre-COVID we had approximately 220,000 electronic books, 260,000 print books, approximately 250,000 e-media, and approximately 10,000 print media. Media is everything from DVDs and that sort of thing,” said Rudowsky.
That is not everything, they also had to add 80,000 more items to their digital offerings.
“The library, in particular, for the things we were analyzing, the items, the resources we were analyzing, you have to do it title by title. So it took a team of people, we had 4-5 staff people, library faculty working on this together, pulling the list, analyzing how often it gets used, figuring out if we can buy it digitally, and if we can’t buy it digitally contacting faculty to figure out how we can help make this available,” said Rudowsky.
The University library is open at a 25 percent capacity, but with the COVID-19 numbers increasing, officials want to encourage students and staff to take advantage of its online offerings.