LAURINBURG – DeTamble Library at St. Andrews Presbyterian College has been awarded an $18,075 grant to equip a room as an instructional classroom to serve the college’s students by enabling them to improve their skills for research involving both print and electronic media and to allow the librarians to upgrade training capability.

The State Library of North Carolina, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources, awarded the federal Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

These federal funds are investments of dollars to help libraries deliver relevant and up-to-date services for their communities. At DeTamble Library, the LSTA grant will equip a classroom to become an instructional classroom consisting of projection equipment, an interactive whiteboard, instructor computer, and seating for 16 students in pairs at eight laptop computers.

“We have been working towards creating a private, flexible instructional space that allows greater interaction between students and instructors,” said Rita Dursi Johnson, library director, upon learning of the award. “The grant period coincided with the availability of a room within the library. Because of these funds, the library can now use that room and provide state of the art educational technologies. Instructors can use multiple pedagogies in classes, and students can use those technologies to become more engaged in the learning process.”

The library expects the classroom to be furnished and operating for its spring 2010 semester.

“We are eagerly anticipating holding the first class there in the spring semester,” Johnson said. “We are excited about the ability to project computer screens to conduct demonstrations of functions or capabilities of the resources, to include other media resources such as short videos, and to construct instruction sessions that use small group projects during sessions, such as creating a wiki on the ethics of information use. Use of multiple technologies in instruction sessions is more the norm than not in the college setting, and we are pleased to be able to offer them to our students.”

The library also plans to share the classroom with the College’s Writing Center and eventually to create a laptop loan program with the new computers, making them available to students after the heaviest instruction period winds down. “We are very fortunate to have obtained the grant and the proposed equipment, and are pleased that we will be able to extend its benefits to our students well beyond the Library’s instruction and information literacy programs,” Johnson said.

DeTamble Library received one of the 185 grants for fiscal year 2009-2010 awarded to North Carolina libraries; funding for all projects totaled $4,717,109. The LSTA grant program administered by the State Library of North Carolina funds projects across the state that help libraries deliver learning opportunities for a lifetime, support libraries in their mission to provide cost-effective access to the Internet and to information expertise, and make library resources more accessible to all users.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute's mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. Through the LSTA Grants to States program IMLS provides funds to State Library agencies using a population-based formula. State libraries may use the appropriation to support statewide initiatives and services; they may also distribute the funds through subgrants to public, academic, school, special, and research libraries.