On behalf of the Libraries at Illinois Institute of Technology, it is my pleasure to welcome you to the Library as we embark on another productive fall semester. Now, more than ever, libraries are dynamic institutions that enable learning and discovery through evolving services, spaces, and collections. Throughout our evolution we remain committed to our core values, as outlined in our strategic plan. These values include:
Quality: The Illinois Institute of Technology Libraries commit to providing excellent resources and patron-centered service resulting in value to the stakeholders.
Our professional librarians are engaged in a number of initiatives to create value for our users, including the development of Scholarly Communications Services, offering tools that will make your life easier as an author, inventor, or citizen. Support and tools include: our institutional repository, journal hosting, copyright navigation, Open Educational Resources, and citation management.
We recently rejoined the Center for Research Libraries, an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries that provides access to five million books, journals, documents and newspapers. Access to their prestigious collections compliments, but does not replace, the Library’s existing collections. Learn more about the collections and benefits of this partnership to you.
Knowledge: We promote access to and the availability and preservation of knowledge, fostering lifelong learning and technological literacy.
We continue to provide information literacy instruction sessions in coordination with the curriculum in addition to innovative co-curricular drop-in workshops with topics ranging from Advanced Google Searching to bicycle repair. We continue to offer individualized research appointments to support the work of students, faculty, and the university community.
Creativity: We foster an environment of innovation, respect, curiosity, risk-taking, diversity and collaboration.
This fall we are excited to be home to an Innovation Pod, in collaboration with the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship. At the Innovation Pod minds collaborate across disciplines to solve problems and innovate in a dedicated physical space equipped with a Microsoft Hub and flexible furniture.
We support innovation through our makerspace services. Our Exploration Space now offers electronic cutting in addition to 3D printing and button making. Our electronic cutter can be used for free to cut a variety of materials into intricate designs.
We are excited to host a number of events with community partners this fall and are always open to new collaborations. Learn about upcoming events on our Google Group, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Intellectual Enrichment: We encourage active listening, the free flow of information and civil discourse.
As always, we offer reservable study rooms for students and enable collaboration through our open spaces, flexible seating, and checkout of devices such as powerstrips, WiFi hotspots, and laptops. In response to student needs we recently added a reservable interview room for students participating in interviews or phone/video conferences.
We are always listening and welcome your feedback. Please contact us at library@iit.edu with any thoughts or suggestions, and please reach out to your subject librarian for an in-depth tour of the resources that will best support you in your teaching and/or learning.
We wish you a wonderful academic year and look forward to seeing you in the Library, in person and online.
