Because of recent changes made at the DeWitt Wallace Library at Macalester, St. Thomas students must now go through different channels in order to borrow the neighboring library’s materials, which may take more time.
Macalester implemented a new online catalog system at its library that is no longer consistent with St. Thomas’ system. In the past, St. Thomas and Macalester have belonged to a group of college libraries known as Cooperating Libraries in Consortium (CLIC), along with Bethel, Augsburg, Concordia, Hamline, Northwestern and St. Catherine.
Last fall, the staff at the Macalester library announced it would be pulling out of the consortium. Macalester Library Director Terri Fishel said that there were multiple reasons for the change.
“The system that CLIC is using is 15 years old. It’s at the end of its life cycle, and in terms of the process of evaluating the systems, we chose to go with a system that over 200 libraries have already implemented,” Fishel said. “It met the needs of Macalester, and it was important to me that it was going to be not only an effective and efficient system, but it would help streamline some of the staff activities.”
Dan Gjelten, director of St. Thomas libraries, said he thinks this new process will be a little more time-consuming than when Macalester was part of CLIC.
“Lending within CLIC is kind of like you carrying a letter to your neighbor’s house, while interlibrary loan is more formal,” Gjelten said. “It’s more like putting the letter in a mailbox and having it go to the post office and then get delivered by the mailman. More hands touching your letter will slow it down.”
Fishel, however, said she believes the new process will not take any extra time.
“There is no slowdown from our end,” Fishel said. “We spent the summer testing to ensure that the delivery times remained the same after we moved to our new system.”
Fishel added that Macalester will benefit financially from the change, as the new system costs less than CLICnet.
Junior Alex Bates said he has minor concerns about the change.
“Macalester removing itself from the CLICnet system has no immediate or very noticeable effects on my experience of the library,” Bates said. ”However, for the sake of having information available to me, I do wish that they had not removed themselves from the system.”
Junior Diana Stoffel, however, said she thinks the change is an inconvenience for students.
“If you’re researching books for, say, a research paper for a class, you can look at the CLICnet database, but then if you want to see if Macalester has a book you have to go directly to Macalester’s website,” Stoffel said. “This will take extra time and time is scarce for college students.”
Both Fishel and Gjelten explained that Tommies can still visit the Macalester library and check out materials using their St. Thomas ID cards.
Although Macalester and St. Thomas no longer use the same library systems, Gjelten emphasized that the relationship between the schools and their devotion to serving their users will not suffer.
“Macalester and St. Thomas have kind of a special relationship just because of our geographic proximity,” Gjelten said. “Both of us are committed to our users – students, faculty and staff – and getting what they need as quickly as possible. And we’ll figure out a way to do that.”
Theresa Bourke can be reached at bour5445@stthomas.edu.