About Us – Thomas F. Holgate Library

About the Holgate Library

The Thomas F. Holgate Library provides the students, faculty, and staff of Bennett College with a comprehensive array of library resources and services in support of the mission of the college and its degree programs. The library is housed in a single, 16,590 square foot structure in the northwest corner of campus. The Instructional Materials Center (CIMC) is located on the ground floor of the library and is independently operated by the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. The library employs Two full-time staff, including the library director and College archivist.

The library staff provides sixty-nine public service hours per week during the fall and spring semesters and forty-five public service hours per week during the summer. Hours are extended during the final exam period.

During public service hours, the library provides students, faculty, and staff with access to numerous technological resources. Available computer workstations include twelve public access desktops, eleven circulating laptops, and fifteen instructional laptops. Available software includes Microsoft Office 2016, Adobe Acrobat 8.0, and resume creator software. In addition, the library provides one computer printing kiosk, one flatbed scanner, and one photocopier.

The library’s total resource holdings include over 133,730 monographs, 214,702 eBooks, 2,400 audio-visual items, and 24,500 periodicals with full-text access. This is accomplished via the collection development policy which supports the educational, research, and service needs of the institution by adjusting as the college evolves.

The library maintains a comprehensive web portal that provides 24-hour access to the library’s OPAC, electronic books, an alphabetical list of databases and electronic resources, research guides, and a library toolkit. Remote access to the library’s electronic resources is provided either by vendor authentication or via proxy server.

The library maintains library policies and procedures to ensure that students, faculty, and staff have timely access to the library’s collections and course reserves items. With the exception of reference items, print books and monographs may be checked out of the library for three weeks and DVDs may be checked out for four days. Reference items, journals, and magazines may be used inside the library only. In addition, the library staff maintains a course reserves section at the circulation desk. Faculty may submit any personal items, including textbooks and items from the library’s general collection, to be held in the reserve section. Students may check out and use reserve items inside the library for two hours at a time during public service hours.

In addition to the library’s local holdings, through a collaborative agreement with academic institutions, the Triad Academic Library Association (TALA) cooperative borrowing agreement, students, faculty, and staff may visit and check out books from most college or university libraries in the greater Triad area. Bennett students also have borrowing privileges with the Greensboro Public Library. In addition to these checkout privileges, students, faculty, and staff may request items via Interlibrary Loan (ILL) from institutions all over the world.

Comprehensive research assistance services for faculty, staff, and students are provided by the r library staff for 69 hours per week. Research assistance services are available during all public service hours and include consultative support for information literacy skills development, including research planning, topic and focus refinement, identifying and using information resources, formatting and proofreading, and plagiarism and citation style.

The library staff provides comprehensive course-related and course-integrated instructional services to all faculty. Library staff coordinates library session curricula, assignments, and handouts with faculty as requested. Content of library instruction sessions is catered to the instructional needs of individual courses and supports information literacy skills development.

In addition to course-related and course-integrated instruction, the library provides to all users weekly drop-in workshops. Drop-in workshop topics include library research basics, evaluating websites for research, plagiarism and citation style, powerful Power-Point presentations, Microsoft Office training, graduate school planning and preparation, and bibliographic management software