Nancy Thompson Library Sponsors Video Contest

By: Keanu Austin

The Nancy Thompson Library is sponsoring a video contest this semester to increase student awareness on how the library’s staff and resources can make a difference to Kean students.

“I think we’ve got a lot of resources here and the students need to know,” said Librarian Luis Rodriguez. “I spoke to students who needed a place to study and they didn’t even know about The Grand Study Hall on the third floor.”

Despite receiving no entries for the video contest in the spring semester of last year, Rodriguez remains hopeful that using videos will help the library’s staff to reach students.

Rodriguez was also enthusiastic about the library’s quality and number of resources as he showed off the Group Presentation Room and its equipment in the library’s Student Technology Laboratory.

The Group Presentation Room, explained Rodriguez, was made so students could work on their projects together. The large television inside, which can connect to laptops, is there so all the students in a group can view their projects comfortably at once instead of having to hover over a single, small laptop.

As for the resources accessible through the library’s website, Rodriguez mentioned Films on Demand. A service that provides streaming access to educational videos. Library PressDisplay, a database that contains current issues of newspapers in their original form, from 97 countries around the world. Naxos Music Library, a resource of music containing diverse genres and more than 1 million tracks.

Rodriguez also mentioned that the library has recently started providing access to digitized Kean yearbooks. The project, which was overseen by Nancy Thompson Librarian Trevar Riley-Reid, contains yearbooks from as far back as the 1930s.

After highlighting only few of the many resources and features the library has to offer, Rodriguez emphasized how vital he believes a library is to a university student’s success, saying, “The best advice I can give to a student is, ‘Ask a librarian.’”

The video contest has a submission deadline of May 15. The winner of the contest will be awarded a $300 gift card, which can be used at the campus bookstore. More details can be found on the library’s website at http://library.kean.edu/.

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