May 2008 Archives

This was our second stop on our tour of Eastern South Dakota Libraries. The Main Library within Siouxland public library system is undergoing construction at the moment. The administrative staff and technical services staff are all temporarily housed in the old health department building across the street from the Main Library.

We met with technical services staff Donna Cranmer, Vicki Biggerstaff, and Jody Fick. They pointed out that when they moved to their temporary location, they had to make immediate adjustments to their cataloging workflow. And, this got them really thinking about what they could change when they move into the new technical services space at the Main Library.

After the meeting, Vicki and Donna took us on a tour of their temporary space. We noticed that each office has a sink as they used to be exam rooms! They walked us over to the Main Library and showed us the torn down section of the building and where all the departments would be relocated once the project was finished (sometime in the next 2 years). There’s a great section on their Web site that tracks the construction as it happens.

We look forward to visiting again to see the new Main Library!

Siouxland Main Library construction, shot from the top of a nearby parking ramp

Siouxland staff recommended that we have lunch at the Falls Cafe, which had an excellent view of the waterfalls.

Mark Wilhelmi and Sara Ring spent four days in mid-May visiting libraries in South Dakota – stopping at South Dakota State University, Siouxland Libraries, the Wegner Health Sciences Information Center, the University of Sioux Falls, the University of South Dakota, and Augustana College. Some of the common themes we encountered were renovation and construction, weeding projects, and libraries gearing up for more collaborative projects with other South Dakota libraries—especially in the realm of digitization.

Below is a summary of the first library we stopped at on our tour of Eastern South Dakota Libraries. We'll be posting blog entries about the other 5 institutions we visited over the next few days.

Briggs Library is located on the South Dakota State University Campus in Brookings. The Briggs library is named for Dr. Hilton M. Briggs, South Dakota State University President Emeritus, President from 1958-1975. They have around 620,000 volumes in their collection.

We met with several staff who work in cataloging, acquisitions, interlibrary loan, and reference. We also had the opportunity to meet David Gleim, their new Dean of Libraries. He explained about their involvement in a collaborative digitization program that is just getting started in South Dakota among the Regents institutions.

One of our favorite parts of the library site visit is the library tour. Mary Caspers Graper took us on a complete tour of the Briggs Library--below are a few pictures we took along the way.

A model of the campus which is situated at the entrance to the library

A poster displaying all of the different variations of SDSU's mascot, the JackRabbit

We were especially impressed with their in-house bindery.

Briggs Library, SDSU