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Feinberg Library Repository Brings Great Works to the World


joshua beatty

The new Feinberg Library director at SUNY Plattsburgh has always had a vision to make the facility a repository for works by all campus constituents beyond faculty scholarship, including undergraduate research works.

Yet Joshua Beatty, the man whose voice sounds like he was born to speak in soft library tones, hasn’t always wanted to be a librarian.

“I grew up in Rhode Island, went to a couple different colleges,” Beatty, who was appointed Feinberg director in early July, said. After a two-year stint studying meteorology at Lyndon State in Vermont, he returned home to the University of Rhode Island and got a degree in anthropology.

“I was an archeologist, living in Williamsburg, Va., doing archeology at Colonial Williamsburg,” he said. He decided to go for his Ph.D. in archaeology at the College of William and Mary, but a chance change in advisers helped him see the error of his ways.

“It was a bad decision; I was miserable,” he said. Instead, in 2009, he decided to change tacks and headed to library school.

Library Degree ‘A Good Fit’

“I’d met my wife (at William and Mary) and asked her, ‘What do I like to do?’ And she said, ‘You like solving problems; you like helping people.’ We thought that sounded like a librarian. The combination of those things and a library degree would make a good fit,” Beatty said. “So I moved to Pittsburgh and attended library school and graduated in 2010.”

It was a matter of weeks before he had a visiting position as an assistant professor for instruction and reference in Feinberg, where a large portion of his job was planning an institutional repository for published work, he said. However, his wife was in a similar visiting position in Saginaw, Michigan.

“We figured with each of us in a visiting position, we’d have twice the chance of getting a permanent job,” he said. She moved to Plattsburgh when Beatty’s position became permanent. Beatty spent a good portion of his early tenure creating that repository, much of which is kept in Special Collections and even more of which can be found digitally online.

“I worked with the faculty senate and administration to develop an open access policy for the college,” Beatty said. “When faculty fills out annual activity reports, they have to include their scholarship; when they add their scholarship, there’s a box to check off if they want to include their work in the collection.”

Undergraduate Research in Repository

Beatty’s repository project has generated a good amount of success, so much so that students doing upper-level, undergraduate research projects were asked if they, too, wanted to have their work included. Google search optimization yields a lot of undergraduate works.

“We aren’t just collecting materials to read here. We’re making an active attempt to make this work available to the outside world,” he said.

As the new director, Beatty is looking at ways to bring more innovation into the library. He’s still solving problems and helping people. He’s just doing it in different ways.

“Reference librarianship is not what it used to be,” he said. “But with the repository, we ask ‘How do we allow people to have their work be seen in public?’ It’s a different sort of problem, but it’s still helping people.”

Still Solving Problems

He’s also finding it extends beyond the request for help locating a book on a shelf.

“Instead of solving a relatively simple problem, now the problems are more complex and people are more closely involved. Now I have to make bigger decisions to organize the library and help our patrons on a larger scale,” he said.

In Beatty’s time, the library has seen the advent of more specialized areas or “zones” to support students who need or want to remove themselves from the general library surroundings, including a wellness zone, sensory-friendly zone, a reading room, a deep quiet area, presentation room and family study room.

A new set of curved shelving graces the area off the second-floor information desk that will be used to display current holdings or special themed materials like those found during Banned Books Week or Pride Month.

“We want to make this a place our students, faculty and staff want to come to, spend time in, and if they have a problem, we’d like to help them solve it,” he said.

— Story, Photo by Associate Director of Communications Gerianne Downs

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