Earlier this semester, Raritan Valley Community College (RVCC) welcomed Dennis Schaub to its faculty as the new director of the library. I sat down with him for an interview about his job, his recommendations for students, and information on the resources offered by the library.
Schaub: Hi. My name is Dennis Schaub. I’m the new director of the library here at RVCC.
Rodzen: How long have you been working here and what do you do or how do you do or what do you do to help students?
Schaub: I started here at Raritan Valley on Feb. 1, 2024, so it’s been about seven weeks since I’ve been here. I’ve been a librarian for many years. I used to work at Wagner College, which is a small liberal arts college on Staten Island, and I came here because this seemed like a really nice place to work with some great students, faculty and staff here in the library. As far as what do I do to help students, I think that the library is sort of a central hub on campus of academic life so what I hope to do is to make the library a place where all students feel welcome and can get the type of help that they need to do high quality research, get all the resources that they need and succeed academically.
Rodzen: I know the library recently implemented a new system in terms of determining the books of the month. Can you explain the change that occurred?
Schaub: Every month at the library we try to buy some popular books, bestsellers, things that people might want to read just for fun, in addition to academic books like that are used in classes, and we also get some new movies on DVD, as well. What we used to do is simply send out an e-mail to people who signed up listing all the new books that we’ve purchased that month, so that people would be aware of what we have, what we are doing now rather than send out just an e-mail with all the books listed is we’ve created a page on our website that has a monthly listing of all the new books and all the new movies, and it’s much easier to use because it has pictures of the covers of the books. It’s all in one place, so it’s an easy way for people to come onto our website and check to see what new materials the library has.
Rodzen: How can students access the new website?
Schaub: There are two ways. The first would be if they wanted to actually sign up to get notified by e-mail, we could send them a link directly to the page that has all the new books on it, and to do that, they would simply have to e-mail Kathy Tenzer. She’s one of our employees here in the library. Her email is Kathy.tenzer@raritanval.edu. Students can simply ask to be put on the list to be notified of the new books each month, she will add any students that wish to be added to that list and they will get an e-mail every month, usually right about the beginning of the month, letting them know what books we’ve added. However, they can also just go on to our website. There’s a link right on the library’s web page that says just books on display. If they click on that and then click on new books, the same list of all the new titles will be listed there so they don’t have to sign up for an e-mail if they don’t want to. That’s strictly if they want to get notified by e-mail every month as a reminder.
Rodzen: Are there any books in the library that you recommend to students specifically?
Schaub: Well, I think it’s hard for me to recommend specific books because they vary so widely depending on what students are interested in and what they’re working on. So of course, as a college library. Much of our collection focuses on books that relate to the courses that students are taking here, and the type of research that they have to do. Therefore, what I would recommend is that they just come into the library, speak to myself or any one of our librarians, and we can help them find whatever books that they’re looking for myself. Personally, I’m a Stephen King fan. If you’re talking about reading for fun, I like to read Stephen King novels so if I was going to say if you were going to read a book, wanted to read a book, that was just a fun read and you like horror, anything by Stephen King would be my choice. However, everyone has different tastes so you just come in and ask us what you’re interested in, and we can pull you in the right direction.
Rodzen: Are there any resources at the library that you recommend to students that they might not know about?
Schaub: There are actually a lot of tools, a lot of things that we have here that I think students aren’t always aware of. First of all, a lot of them didn’t know that we get sort of popular books like I was talking about earlier, and those are always fun. We also have a large number of databases that have all sorts of information in them on almost any subject, and sometimes students don’t realize that they’re there; that’s why I always say the same advice, which is to come into the library and ask the librarian, because we can point you in the right direction. I think we have over 50 different databases in our library, and they all cover different subjects; sometimes it’s hard to know which would be the best one depending on what you’re trying to find. All of the librarians are experts in that, and we can point you in the right direction, so make use of us. They’re probably the best resource we have here in the library. Their knowledge is can really.
Rodzen: Speaking of the resources such as for example, the databases, I know the school also provides a free New York Times subscription. Is this done through the library or is this done through somewhere else and are there other resources similar to this that are offered through the school?
Schaub: The New York Times is a great resource, and it is through the library. There’s a link right on our libraries web page to sign up. As a matter of fact, probably the easiest way to find it is to simply click on the tab that says frequently asked questions and type in New York Times and that will provide you with a link directly to where you would go to sign up for your access to the [New York] Times. Every student can sign up, and once you do, you will have full access to the New York Times website, including all the articles, the archives, etc. In terms of other resources like that, that’s probably the one that’s used most often. However, another one that a lot of students don’t know about is we have access to streaming videos as well. We are subscribed to a database called Swank, and there’s a lot of popular films on there that you can go on and watch. That’s available to all of our students. We also have another database called Kanopy, which also has a large collection of videos. Swank has more popular movies and Kanopy has more documentaries and educational films, but there’s a lot of great stuff on both of those. It’s all free to students, so I would recommend checking them out.
