Purpose
Available Materials
Digital Collections
Loan Services
Instruction
Rolvaag History
The St. Olaf College libraries serve the college community by providing access to a
universe of information, knowledge and art. The libraries support the college’s mission
by providing systematic instruction in the retrieval and evaluation of information as well
as active support of the college’s curriculum.
Available Materials
The collection, housed in three separate libraries (Rølvaag Memorial Library, Hustad
Science Library, and Halvorson Music Library), includes approximately 420,000 books,
22,000 media items, 5000 periodical titles, and 18,000 scores. An increasing number of
journals are received electronically. The Libraries are also a partial depository for federal
government documents.
While our collection development policy focuses on materials that support the college
curriculum, we have unusual strengths and emphases which reflect unique elements in the
tradition of the college. The collections in religion, Scandinavian literature and history,
mathematics, and music are especially strong. St. Olaf is one of the few places where
extensive materials can be found on the culture of Norwegian-Americans, particularly
their church life. Our patrons also benefit from the rich holdings of the Hong
Kierkegaard Library, the Norwegian-American Historical Association, and the
Shaw-Olson Center for College History.
In 2003, St. Olaf and Carleton Colleges embarked on a project to merge our library
catalogs, funded in part by a generous Mellon Foundation grant. This work was
completed in 2004, when we launched Bridge, the catalog of collections at both schools.
The success of this project exceeded our expectations and led us to apply for a second
Mellon grant to explore ways of improving and expanding our work together. With the
money received from Mellon, we completed several projects: an intensive review of the
strengths/weaknesses across both our collections, a joint serials review, consolidation of
our government documents and inactive serials collections, and enhancements to our
Innovative Interfaces library system software.
Physical materials in the Bridge catalog are made available to faculty, staff and students
on both campuses via a twice-daily courier service. The rate of cross-library borrowing
between St. Olaf and Carleton now averages over 16,000 items per year. In practice, the
Carleton and St. Olaf collections are “two collections functioning as one.” Both libraries
strive to make decisions about acquisitions and services to complement what is available
at the other. Students and faculty at both institutions are enthusiastic about the resulting
expansion of materials readily available to them.
The libraries are central to a campus-wide digitization effort focused on creating more
online content for our many unique collections. We recently completed digitization of the
first thirty years of the Manitou Messenger, St. Olaf’s student newspaper. The libraries
are working with departments across campus, including Dance, Mathematics, German,
and Music, to digitize and create metadata for selected portions of their collections, and
to add them, as appropriate, to the campus online collections.
In addition to locally created content, the libraries subscribe to online books, journals, and other resources. For information, please consult our Research Finding Tools and Periodicals Title List.
The St. Olaf Libraries circulate over 115,000 physical materials annually to users on
campus, Carleton College, and local community members. Each library also provides
Course Reserves services, circulating over 22,000 physical reserve items per year in
addition to an ever-increasing number of e-reserves, which provide access to articles, book
chapters, and streaming audio.
Last year, our Interlibrary Loan office borrowed over 7,000 items for St. Olaf students,
faculty, and staff and filled over 2,400 loan requests. Interlibrary Loan also oversees our
recently-implemented Purchase On Demand (POD) service, which added 180 items to our
permanent collection in 2008. The POD service allows us to enhance our collection by
purchasing, rather than borrowing, those student-requested materials that are judged to
be appropriately scholarly and current.
The St. Olaf College Libraries have a history of providing course-integrated library
instruction that dates from the 1970s, when St. Olaf was awarded a prestigious
NEH/CLR grant to begin such a program. Instruction in information literacy is an
integral aspect of the libraries' identity and mission in support of excellence in
undergraduate education. The number of assignment-based research sessions conducted
by liaison librarians has steadily increased from 135 two decades ago to 222 in the last
academic year, serving 5189 attendees in the overall student population of 3000. Library
instruction plays a vital role in the first-year curriculum: almost all incoming students are
required to take a First Year Writing (FYW) course that contains a research component
that students explore with liaison librarians. First-year students also are exposed to
research methods in “Bible in Culture and Community” classes (Religion 121) as well as
Biology, Music, and other first-year courses.
The libraries strive to be both partners and leaders in issues that include a campus-wide
emphasis on learning outcomes, an increased investment in electronic resources and
innovative technologies, and the opportunity and necessity to collaborate with faculty in
order to embed research as an essential component in students’ coursework. In
partnership with several departments (Psychology, Music, English, Asian Studies) we offer
a sequential, course-integrated approach to information literacy.
In support of the college’s ongoing commitment to learning assessment, librarians —
together with the Office of Institutional Research and Evaluation, classroom faculty, and
librarians at seven other liberal arts institutions — designed a web-based survey
instrument (the Research Practices Survey, RPS) to measure the research experiences,
attitudes, and proficiencies of incoming college students. St. Olaf has played a key
leadership role in the construction of this survey, the development of the data analysis
protocols, its adoption by other institutions, and its future availability through the Higher
Education Data Sharing Consortium (HEDS). RPS results show how students’ research
practices and proficiencies change during college, and allow comparisons between St. Olaf
students and students in other liberal arts institutions. Evidence from the Research
Practices Survey is intended to inform and improve instruction in academic research in
both the classroom and the library.
The libraries are actively engaged with other constituents on campus in an effort to
provide our undergraduates with the best possible skills to navigate our information-rich
world. For example, librarians work with and advise students designing individualized
majors in the Center for Integrative Studies, and librarians collaborate with the Center for
Innovation in the Liberal Arts (a forum for conversations and collaboration among
faculty about learning, teaching and scholarship), the Academic Support Center,
and Information and Instructional Technologies.
Faculty and librarians from St. Olaf have written and presented extensively about
information literacy in local, national and international settings. In additional they have
consulted for other institutions and have mentored librarians from Thailand and Japan in
this area. For a complete bibliography, see:
http://www.stolaf.edu/library/instruction/infolit/infolitpubs.html.
Although completed in 1942, Rolvaag Memorial Library remained without a name until 1944. Advocates for Rølvaag encountered concern among those who objected to the "sordid" realism of his novels and his criticism of the cultural sensibilities of some Lutheran clergy. (Shaw, Dear Old Hill, p. 142)
The Felland wing (1966) provided additional stack space and quarters for the Norwegian American Historical Society (NAHA). The Dittmanson wing (1991) added more stack and study space. Renovation of the original building accompanied the construction of Dittmanson.
Today, NAHA, the Kierkegaard Library, IIT, English Department, and the St. Olaf College Archives share a building with Rolvaag Memorial Library.