Librarian Contributions in Launching a New Veterinary Medicine College

Abstract

In this presentation we will describe the different roles we have played in working with faculty and administrators through the accreditation and launch of the new College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) at the University of Arizona. The liaison librarian played a key role, beginning with gathering information for the Library & Information Resources chapter (Standard 5) of the self-study report for the American Veterinary Medical Association Council on Education accreditation team’s site visit. Once the college received the Letter of Reasonable Assurance in the accreditation process, the Vet Med liaison librarian and the Open Education Librarian began working in earnest with newly hired faculty. We did multiple onboarding sessions about library services and resources, including free-to-use course materials. CVM wanted to keep course material costs as low as possible, so we provided extensive support in identifying open educational resources and multi-user ebook titles. For Fall 2020, the library was able to provide free access to 38 of 41 required textbooks to CVM students. As the first cohort of students began their studies, we embedded a Library Resources Community in the CVM’s Elentra platform to share resources and to communicate directly with faculty and students.