Artist's rendition of the UW Tacoma permanent campus

The Birth of a Library

Deborah J. Stansbury Sunday and Suzanne Klinger, Tacoma Campus Library

The library at the UW Tacoma campus was established to meet the curriculum-related needs of its faculty, staff and students. Because the library cannot own everything its clientele needs, collection and service emphasis is on access.

Library staff faced a number of challenges in the first years of operation. When we opened our doors to students and faculty in 1990, we did have a reference desk. However, we had almost no books in the stacks and our "ready reference" section fit onto a very small bookshelf. What we did have were a few online resources and a system of resource sharing that allowed us to rely on the collections housed in the libraries on the Seattle campus. Also, a group of librarians from Odegaard Undergraduate Library had identified a core journal collection for the library, so we had "magazines."

One of the most frequently asked questions in the early years was, "Where are the books?" The stack area had ranges and ranges of empty shelves; an echo could be heard in the room. We spent considerable time convincing new and prospective students that the collections of the UW Seattle were only a shuttle trip away.

The library has grown since then, but the challenges still resemble those early ones. As an almost entirely computer-centered library, we have the capacity to support almost any research, but we must assist our students as they cope with the complexities of returning to college in the age of information. The majority of our students are non-traditional with an average age of 34. Because many associate "surfing" with the Beach Boys instead of the Internet, much of our library instruction centers on helping students become comfortable with computer-based technologies.

The interdisciplinary nature of the curriculum has forced the librarians to acquire a broad understanding of the structure and interrelatedness of many disciplines in order to build the collection. Faculty have also been active participants in the collection development effort from the very beginning. Because the Tacoma Campus is growing and adding new degree programs each biennium, we are continually learning something new.

Although our book collection now has over 20,000 volumes, we still rely heavily on the collections of UW Seattle and Bothell. For students coming from community colleges where there were usually adequate materials on their library shelves, identifying, evaluating and requesting materials suited to upper division research is a daunting task. We help them by working closely with faculty to anticipate research needs, by emphasizing the importance of tackling research assignments early in the quarter, and by instructing students about the information available through a close reading of an online record. We also collect and distribute information about the "turnaround" times required when requesting materials from another site.

The entire campus will be moving to a permanent site in the historic warehouse district of downtown Tacoma in the summer of 1997. You can follow this much anticipated event by tapping into the UWT home page on the World Wide Web.