North Shore Community College Case Study

With campuses in Danvers and Lynn, Massachusetts, North Shore Community College serves nearly 10,000 students and offers 71 degrees and certificates. More than 235,000 North Shore residents have taken courses at NSCC since 1965, and over 92% of North Shore’s 29,000+ graduates live and work on the North Shore. North Shore’s library supplies approximately 70% of credit courses with textbook reserves.

Challenges

With growing online and hybrid learning programs, North Shore Community College serves a non-residential and diverse student base who have time restraints regarding when and for how long they can physically be on campus, if at all. Many students hold full-time jobs, have families, or have other demands on their time. These factors together created a content accessibility issue that NSCC’s library aimed to solve.

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While NSCC’s library supplied print textbook reserves for students to access, the process for students to access these materials was inflexible. Students needed to be on campus and physically in the library to gain access to the books and were limited to accessing them for only a few hours at a time. With the goal in mind to create a more equitable, affordable, and accessible process, Rex Krajewski, Director of Library & Learning Resource Services at North Shore Community College, began investing in a digital textbook reserves collection.

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When COVID-19 shifted on-campus learning to completely remote, demand for digital content exploded. Though the library already had a hybrid print/digital textbook reserve model, the print reserves were rendered unusable overnight, and students lost all access to them.

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Rex and his team decided not to circulate print reserves, as the quarantining and sanitizing processes were too labor-intensive. Instead, they decided to go completely digital and dedicated the entirety of their resources and energy to building out their digital reserves.

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Rex recognized the need for an affordable, uncomplicated system that provided seamless integration and compatibility with NSCC’s course management system, and allowed multiple users to access content reserves concurrently. Key to their success was having a single discovery point for students to access the content.

Solution

BibliU offered a solution that worked well for NSCC, providing the college’s non-residential student base with access to all of the library’s digital reserves from a single discovery point via BibliU’s integration with NSCC’s course management system.

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North Shore now uses BibliU’s unique On-Demand Learning model, which provides an affordable solution for digital reserves, ensuring the library pays only for content that students actually use. BibliU enables students to access digital resources on-demand, so multiple students can use reserve content without needing to wait for the content to “free up.”

Results

With BibliU, NSCC’s students gained immediate, concurrent access to the library’s now fully digital textbook reserves. By integrating with the college’s established systems, BibliU gave students a single access point for the content they needed for their classes. The library had an affordable, equitable, and accessible solution that solved access issues for students and eliminated manual labor for the library.

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With BibliU, students now have digital access to content that the library otherwise would not have been able to provide in the wake of COVID-19 -- a necessary and permanent innovation driven by the global pandemic. NSCC can now ensure that every student is empowered with the content they need to succeed in their remote studies.