Roane State Community College

Rachel East, left, and Bianca Gordon, right, are pictured with librarian Becca Decker in the library on Roane State's Oak Ridge campus.
 
Sept. 22, 2016

A great library is the heart of a great college. Roane State Community College Library helps its students and faculty by building collections of the best books, articles, videos and other resources. But having thousands of books and millions of articles is only helpful if people can easily find them. 

That's the challenge the library's newest search tool, OneSearch, seeks to solve.

OneSearch, a library discovery tool, promises an easier way to search library holdings across a variety of formats, collections and locations.

Roane State Libraries operate three physical libraries (Harriman, Oak Ridge and the Scott County campus) serving Roane State's nine teaching locations. Roane State's library collections offer 43,000 print books, over 250,000 eBooks as well as millions of fulltext articles from a wide array of magazines and journals. 

Before OneSearch, knowing where to start searching required a bit of experience and planning. The library's catalog, Millennium by Innovative Interfaces, listed the books, eBooks and videos available in the library collections. 

To find articles, a library user needed to separately consult one of 63 different databases to find the best articles. Knowing and searching the correct database was a major hurdle.

"It was too confusing," says Robert Benson, Roane State's director of library services. “Librarians love to search, but most people just love to find."

 OneSearch, Benson said, "is meant to clear the hurdles that users have to cross to start using the library."

OneSearch searches the library catalog and most library databases with one search. This allows library users to start finding the best of what the library has to offer more easily.

Roane State students and employees already have OneSearch accounts established. By logging in to OneSearch, library users can find and request delivery of books from any of the library's three print collections to any Roane State teaching location. Using their OneSearch account also allows library users to save their favorite results and favorite searches for later use. Library patrons can manage their library account through OneSearch, including the ability to renew checked out items for continued use.

Roane State library started providing access to OneSearch in July. OneSearch is Roane State's renaming of Primo, a product of the Ex Libris company.

"The OneSearch experience will get better and better as we learn how our patrons use the system," Benson said. Work is already underway to reduce the number of "clicks" it takes to get to the college's eBook collections, he said.

While the physical libraries offer amenities, like group study rooms, and services on site, many of the library's online resources can be accessed from anywhere.

 "With OneSearch, you don't always have to come to the library; the library can come to you," Benson says.