Librarians

Academic Library

About the APUS Library

Video Intro I Monthly Update I Resources I Librarians/Staff I News I Committees I Vision

The best of tradition unfolds at the cutting-edge of education and research on the Web. APUS's combined AMU/APU Library is the leader among online universities and helping to define a new era in information services. Its professional librarians offer a human touch. They bring unmatched Web skills and uncover treasure troves of information for our students and faculty. Please explore, make suggestions, and join them.

AMU/APUS Librarians 2011: Front Row from Left to Right: Dr Fred Stielow, Susan Hyland, Sue Gilroy, Dr. Ray Uzwyshyn, Andrea Dunn; Second Row Left to Right: Dr Carole Nowicke, Kimberly Adams, Maryelizabeth Gano, Priscilla Coulter, Susan Fingerman, Susan Gilroy, Linda Cranston, A. Marissa Smith, Christy Stevens, Bradley Wiles, Emily Harrell, Neville Grow, Prudence Cendoma
AMU/APU Librarians, 2011

                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

arrow January/February Notices

World Literature Anthology
From APU Press

RESOURCES

APUS (AMU/APU) Online Library: Open for students and faculty--24 hours daily, 7 days a week.

APUS Physical Library 330 North George St (Academics Building), Charles Town, WV, 25414:  The physical library is open to APUS employees, students and official visitors.  Open to the public by appointment; Monday-Thursday, 9:00 am-4:00 pm.  Contact orc@apus.edu to make an appointment. 

So What's in the Virtual Library?

APUS Library Stack View
View of APUS Library Stacks

What else can I find? Is there help for my studies? 

Librarians 

When in doubt, ask a librarian. AMU/APU Librarians are the most highly qualified in the business. These busy telecommuters are scattered around the nation and even internationally. They add an unprecedented layer of Web expertise and quality assurance to the University's curriculum.

Charles Town Headquarters Staff 

Electronic Course Materials

Library & Tutorial Center

AMU Press

Return to Top

In the News

Advisory Committees

Each of the University's Schools have been invited to convene Library Advisory Committees to assist with the selection of appropriate materials and the construction of its Study Portal. The general University Library Committee (Library and Learning Resources Committee) was established in September 2004 and continues with:

Mission & Goals  

Acting in direct response to the mission of American Public University System, the Online Library has a dual set of goals. These facilities primarily strive to remotely provide faculty and students with the information specialists, resources and supplemental training needed for their classroom and research pursuits. The Library brings emphasis on Information Literacy and rapidly evolving Web resources. Secondarily, it seek to proactively promote and display the University's unique perspectives and research contributions to the world's knowledge.

Vision: Library Professionalism & Faculty Partnerships for an Evolving Web Education

The APUS Online Library strives for academic excellence and professional leadership as part of a new wave of Academic Librarianship. This fully virtual facility is created to provide state-of-the-art research and educational support for the University; moreover, services that are available at any time of the day or night and regardless of geographic location. To these ends, the School has specially committed to professional librarians. Such staff provide personalized relationships, but also advanced subject and Web skills. APUS librarians help ensure competency and currency in Web Information Literacy, information-seeking behaviors, instructional tools, myriad of online resources, search engine applications, and study aids--as well as the display of the University's contributions to the world's knowledge. This complex role is intended to blend in active partnerships with the disciplinary/teaching expertise of faculty. The design is part of an interactive learning community with our students, alumni, and other staff--nothing less than a new idea of the university for the Web Era. 

Redefining Academic Libraries--2005: Essay on the Launching of an Online Library

Universities and their libraries have constantly evolved in a complex ballet--one that balances among pedagogy, media, information resources, and technology. Planning for the latest scenario at an online university must draw on advanced technology and management, but can also look to history for underlying tradition and long-range perspective. The sum helped formulate today's pioneering virtual library launch at the American Public University System with its flagship American Military University and American Public University.

Current Web efforts are thus actively informed by events that date to the 13th Century and Italy. Then, bands of students began to hire master instructors for a daring venture in higher education. Building from libraries as the first permanent structures, the results were the birth of the university in the West. This new institution focused on training a new cadre teaching masters as it resuscitated Greek and Roman classical knowledge.

The first university libraries built on monastic copying traditions from the Dark Ages--the Opus Deum that preserved sacred texts after the fall of the Roman Empire. Academic libraries, however, augmented the sacred with the profane of secular codices. Their costly treasures were large format lectern readings that were often chained to a study carrel. These were also the fount for the first classroom materials. Excerpts or exemplars from the classic texts formed the basis for discussion and exigesis. The demand for these offshoots even fostered new guilds of secular copyists, as well as a minor communications revolution. Demand could hardy have been met by the prohibitively expensive parchment and vellum of the era. Fortunately for student pocketbooks, paper making arrived on the scene at the same time. [I hasten to note that commentators at the time were worried by the impermanence of paper with its annoying tendency to only last some 200 years.]

Change continued with Gutenberg’s Revolution. Librarians gave up their copying duties, but took the lead as institutional purchasers of printed materials and in the process redefined their space and activities. Chains were removed, and facilities enlarged to greet the massive increase in book production. Publisher/printers, arguably the first modern capitalists, structured the trappings of the modern book and quickly expanded beyond preserving the classical knowledge. They worked with scholars to stimulate a rebirth--the Renaissance--of knowledge and a new Humanistic curriculum. Personal authorship and scholarly investigation reappeared along with the scientific method--all enhanced by the powerful invention of portable reading.

The 19th-Century "Rise of the Masses" provided yet another revolutionary wave in this saga. Changes in paper and printing technologies significantly lowered production costs to ever more affordable levels. At the same time, grammar school education became the norm and literacy spread. Publishers developed a variety of genre from the modern newspaper and illustrated magazines to textbooks. Moreover, a "New University" movement and American Land-Grant Schools revamped classic Liberal Arts into the scientific curriculum and departmental structures that we know today.

The library once again redefined itself--albeit in even more dramatic fashion. Americans invented the public library as a "people's university." Academic libraries were redefined as monumental presences dedicated to research and situated at the heart of the new campuses.  To handle the massive influx of books and equally unprecedented rise of academic journals, librarians developed innovative taxonomies for all of human knowledge (e.g., Dewey Decimal System), professionalized with a new library degree, worked in concert with vendors, and opened new reference along with other types of service. Physical space was increasingly reoriented from a general purpose into specialized reading rooms and separate storage stacks, which could hold millions of volumes. Unfortunately for some traditionalist, by the early 20th Century these reforms even extended to defiling the hallowed halls by opening to undergraduates.

The 20th century also brought an even wider array of publications and services. The post-World War II GI bill democratized campuses with thousands of new students in need of study spaces. Libraries themselves embraced newer technologies from indexing systems and catalog cards to telephony, microfilm, and the 1960's revolution wrought by photocopiers. The university library even led the way for the adoption of computerized practices. The 1968's MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) rules opened to cataloging applications, as well as OPAC's (Online Public Access Catalogs) in the 1970's and 1980's. Libraries were additionally among the first proponents of WANs (wide-area networks)--including their participation in ARPANET--the U.S. military network that evolved into the Internet in 1985.

Not surprisingly then, libraries are stepping to the forefront within the unfolding and revolutionary climate of the World Wide Web. With the Web's appearance in the early 1990s, libraries quickly extended their traditional roles as bastions of integrity and reliable resources to become "trusted" information portals. The field took cutting-edge stands in the drive for Web services to all citizens, instructions in the new skills of Web Information Literacy, defending intellectual freedom, and a universal digital library movement to preserve the world's electronic heritage.

As suggested by this launch of an online library, APUS has actively joined the developments and consciously focused on its library. Harkening to the birth of the Western university, our modern library portal seeks to establish the school's identity and affirm pedagogical leadership. The Online Library site goes beyond the basic array of available electronic books and journals. It pushes to the forefront with high-level Information Literacy training and dynamic Department Study Portals. Somewhat like Renaissance-era departmental libraries, the latter are individually tailored for immediate service at one's finger tips. They proffer an innovative package of professional literature that are licensed from the Invisible Web, as well as governmental and other "trusted" sites from the Visible Web. To such resources, we hope to add a re-engineered class of academic librarians. These Web research/subject specialists will be charged with engaging faculty and students to dynamically improve our research collections. We foresee a new era of metrically driven assessment/services, but also harken to 13th-Century origins with a crucial shift toward direct course support. The overall results project as harbinger of the latest stage or paradigm shift in higher education and another redefinition of the Academic Library.

You are invited to observe, participate, and assist us with the unfolding of the Virtual Academic Library--a tale that we believe will be at the forefront of university research modes and course material utilization within the Web Revolution.

Fred Stielow, Ph.D., M.L.S.
APUS Library Services
October 8, 2005

Return to Top