2018/19 Library & Learning Commons Annual Report

The Library's increasing focus on digital collections is a response to the shifting research habits of students and faculty. While physical circulation saw a slight uptick this year, the vast majority of Library resources are accessed online. The Library facilitated the highest number of electronic downloads in its history in 2018/19.

With total expenditures on Library collections now reaching half a million dollars, the library increasingly leverages the scalability of electronic resources, including online databases of journal articles, ebooks and streaming videos, to meet the needs of students where and when they are, be it in the Library on a break from class, or in the middle of the night at home while working to complete an assignment due the following day.

Focusing on the needs of our students, the Library takes an evidence based approach to building its collection. To this end, Langara librarians work closely with their instructor colleagues in individual departments to curate the Library’s collections to meet the specific needs of students and instructors.

Despite investing heavily in valuable multidisciplinary resources in recent years, the Library cannot provide instant access to the entire world of scholarly information; nevertheless, through reciprocal agreements and a network of libraries working together, the Library is able to source articles and books from larger institutions in British Columbia and beyond in order to provide for even the most esoteric research needs of students and instructors.

To highlight and promote open textbook usage on campus, the Library ran a monthly Open Champions campaign, recognizing specific Langara faculty and staff members for their contribution and commitment to the open movement. The champions' contributions were shared through the Academic Innovation Newsletter and the Library's social media accounts, with the aim to raise interest and awareness of open educational resources (OER) among both students and faculty.

Pictured: Our first Open Champion Jeremy Chiu, an instructor in the Mathematics and Statistics department, whose adoption of an open textbook has saved his students over $20,000 in textbook costs.

Langara College continues to be one of the heaviest adopters of open textbooks among B.C. post-secondary institutions. 2018/19 saw drastic increases in both the number of instructors adopting open textbooks and the resulting amount of money saved by students. 68 course sections used open textbooks this year, exactly doubling the amount from 2017/18.