Naugatuck Valley Community College (NVCC)

Naugatuck Valley Community College is a 40 year old institution which offers Associate's degrees, credit certificates and non credit programs (2 and 4 years) in a wide variety of disciplines. The school is located in Waterbury CT, and serves over 5,000 students.

The TEAGLE Interview

The interview for the TEAGLE project took place on December 20, 2005. The following library staff and faculty participated in the interview:

1. Sam Brown, Library Director
2. Elizabeth J. Frechette, Reference Librarian, College Archivist
3. Leonard C. Yannielli, Biological Sciences
4. Gail H. Casper, Grants Officer
5. Margaret Palmeri, Business Division
6. Farshad Malek Ahmadi, Social Sciences/Sociology Department

Available local special collections at the Max. R. Traurig Library Resource Center

The library is responsible for the College archives, but these are not accessible at the moment. Other smaller special collections include foreign language films, and an art collection (some photographs and paintings). The library does not collect special materials, or accepts gifts that do not align with the College's mission of teaching. In short, the library holds no special collections or primary resources other than the College Archives (which are not accessible). There are no preservation policies for the pictures and paintings - they are not described, just 'present' in the library.

However, the library intents to build a modest 'special collection' through the 'Oral History Project'. Sam Brown, library director, got the idea to start this project, after faculty and staff at the school were honored for 35 years of service. The purpose of the project is to create an oral history of Naugatuck Valley Community College which will add to the recorded history in the College Archives. For this purpose, college staff will be interviewed and asked to talk about their experience at the college. The library recently began interviewing College employees (e.g. administrators, faculty, and staff), starting with those who have a long tenure at the institution. The interviews will be placed on the library's website.

In addition, the project aims to provide an example of a methodology for creating oral history (e.g. interview techniques) to be used in teaching. The library is responsible for the project at this point in time and has the support of the college's administration. It is carried out in a rather informal and practical way: the library just started to work on it; there is no project plan, no cooperation with faculty, or additional funding available.

Cooperation with faculty and students is foreseen in the future, but only after the library has acquired some experience and tested different methodologies. The reference librarian, Elizabeth Frechette, is carrying out the project, and attended a conference about oral history last year. She found this very useful, not in the least because of the opportunity to network and meet colleagues who have experience with similar projects. She did not attend TEAGLE Opening Conference in June 2005 (the library director Sam Brown did). Liz presently does not have any contacts within the Teagle group and is not sure how the Teagle project could help her with her own project.

The use of primary sources in library collections in teaching

Overall, students are not required to use primary sources for their studies: undergraduate research would be limited to literature studies. When asked, the faculty present at the interview would indicate that students usually don't have time to find and interpret original documents. One exception they can think of is the case of a non-credit genealogy course, where the students use the vast internet resources available to them. One other experience that is mentioned is the fact that biology students produced films after they did field work in Chile. These video films are used in teaching (but are not part of the library collection).

The faculty members present at the interview have no experience using primary sources in their teaching other than newspapers or magazines, or foresee the need for it in the future. It follows that they do not know of any useful collections in the area, or be aware of virtual collections of interest: they have not been looking for those. When an assignment warrants it, the librarians will point students needing special sources to other state and local libraries and to digitized collections, e.g. American Memory.

Occasionally students in various courses at NVCC are required to research main events in the year of their birth. In order to accomplish this, some students elect to use the local newspaper, the Waterbury Republican American, and are referred to the microfilm collection at the Silas Bronson Library (Waterbury's public library).

Library Website:

http://www.nvcc.commnet.edu/resources/library.shtml
Contacts

Samuel R. Brown, Ph.D.
Director of Library Services
(203) 575-8022
sbrown@nvcc.commnet.edu

Liz Frechette
Reference/Instruction Librarian and College Archivist (203) 575-8106
efrechette@nvcc.commnet.edu