Company Profile

Company Overview

At Linn-Benton Community College, we endeavor to honor and embrace the uniqueness of every individual, and promote the free and civil expression of ideas, perspectives and cultures. Our values of opportunity and inclusiveness are deliberately embedded in our hiring practices to help us development and support a culturally diverse workforce of educators, administrative and support staff. We are committed to teaching and working in a culturally rich environment where the principles of equity, pluralism and social justice live in our policies and in our actions. We encourage qualified individuals of minority or other underrepresented groups, people with disabilities and veterans to apply.

Library and Learning Center Director Position Background and Context within the College

The Library and Learning Center Director is a new management position, formed after many years of independent faculty leadership in the Learning Center and the Library. Our Learning Center faculty member recently retired after a long and productive tenure, and we decided that a management position would be a better fit for the amount of staff supervision and administrative responsibilities across these two distinct areas. The Library and Learning Center are co-located on different floors of the same building and have a history of collaboration that we would like to build on by having them under a single leader. At the same time, these two areas have distinct missions and are separate organizational units that require a leader who understands the professional practices in each and can effectively guide staff and faculty.

The director will report to the Dean of Academic Progression and will join a division management team that includes our student accessibility director and our student conduct and retention manager. LBCC has four academic instruction divisions (Science, Engineering, and Math; Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities; Healthcare; and Advanced Manufacturing and Transportation Technology) and two divisions that span the college: Academic Foundations and Academic Progression. Academic Foundations deals with getting students started off well at the college, and contains our admissions area, our registrar, high school programs, academic advising, and other services. Academic Progression, where this position will be housed, deals with keeping students on track to graduation. Our division contains the Learning Center and the Library, our university partnerships office, international programs, the Center for Accessibility Resources, student placement and assessment, co-curricular programs (which are out-of- classroom learning opportunities), and student conduct.

The Learning Center

The Learning Center has a beautiful space on the second floor of Willamette Hall in our Albany Campus, an annex at our Corvallis location, and offers remote and limited in-person services in our East Linn county locations. We offer a variety of services designed to support students’ academic support needs: a Writing Center that offers drop-in support, appointments, and an online essay feedback service; drop-in math support for both developmental and higher-level math classes (the former is in a separate and welcoming space that provides free coffee to encourage reluctant math students); individual, group, and course-embedded tutoring (nascent but growing); and individualized academic coaching that focuses on study strategies, organizational skills, stress management, and other student barriers to success.

The Learning Center is staffed by a dedicated team of full-time classified instructional specialists, four of whom operate as area leads, a talented group of part-time instructional assistants, and student tutors. Our employees are highly trained and maintain professional currency in adult learning theory generally and as it applies to their field.

The Library
Linn-Benton Community College Library has a main facility in the Albany campus, connected with the Learning Center on the second floor through a stairway and elevator, which allows for complementary services between the two departments. There is a healthcare-focused library branch in Lebanon, library services in the college’s center in Corvallis, as well as consortial sharing of resources with our public library partners in Linn County. The library also serves members of our local community.

The Library has a small faculty team with almost 60 years of experience in academic libraries and a strong track record of participation and leadership in the areas of OER, instruction, and diversity locally, regionally, and nationally. We also employ full-time classified staff and part-time librarians and reference assistants.

Our modest collection supports academic disciplines across the college with instructional materials for faculty and research materials for students. For an academic library of our size, we have particularly strong literacy, Spanish-language, children’s literature, and gender and sexuality collections. Librarians engage regularly with college faculty to develop the collection and provide information literacy instruction to their students.

We also provide the Student Help Desk, the primary technical support for all LBCC students. The Student Help Desk is well-regarded for its positive impact on student retention, particularly in a remote learning environment.

The Library invests heavily in open source software, using open source solutions for its integrated library system, discovery layer, institutional repository, and library guides. The library is a leader in Open Educational Resource and Textbook Affordability work. As a result of our campus’ work, students have saved an estimated $5,377,462 between winter 2015 and winter 2020. This work positioned the college to provide low-cost, high-quality instructional materials throughout the pandemic. With the support of the Library, many LBCC faculty are exploring open pedagogy and creating their own open materials.