Apr 27, 2024  
2023-2024 Catalog 
  
2023-2024 Catalog

Hoffman Family Library



Facility and Staff

The Hoffman Family Library, located in Goodwin University’s main campus building, is designed to provide support for all student, faculty and curricular needs. The library is open six days a week, with regular hours posted on the website and extended hours during exam weeks. The library is open to members of the Goodwin University community only, and is not open to the public.

To address individual study and research needs, there are computer workstations, laptops available for in-house use, and wi-fi throughout. The library offers leisure seating, study carrels, research tables, group study rooms, a computer classroom, a collaboration station, book stacks and an area for periodicals.

Professional librarians and library support staff provide assistance whenever the library is open. The librarians also offer remote, real time reference assistance through our website’s chat feature and via text message and Zoom. Librarians are actively engaged in teaching information literacy and research skills, and communicate and collaborate with faculty and students in every department through the library liaison program. Librarians also assist and train students with locating, retrieving and evaluating information, work with instructors to develop specialized lectures, assist with the use of information management tools, link library resources to the course by creating subject-specific research guides, and work with faculty to identify and recommend new library materials and resources for the collection.

The library is an open and welcoming place for all members of the Goodwin University community.

Collections and Services

The library holds over 6,000 physical books in-house, as well dozens of print periodical subscriptions and a wide variety of audiovisual resources. The library director, in collaboration with faculty and professional library staff, provides ongoing collection development with both print and electronic resources to fully support the requirements of the curriculum. Selection is based upon professional reviews, relevance to the curriculum, and faculty and staff recommendations.

The library has substantial online collections. The library website is accessible from multiple devices and provides essential information on services and collections, giving an integrated research experience with access to resources and research guides. The library subscribes to 62 research databases, which provide access to over 150,000 eBooks as well as a wealth of high-quality full-text online journals and periodicals.

Through the library’s participation on the Council of Connecticut Academic Library Directors (CCALD), Goodwin has borrowing privileges from an additional 14 private academic institutions in the state, including all of the libraries at Yale University. The library supplements these services with interlibrary loans through OCLC’s “WorldShare ILL” service, which allows it to request materials from hundreds of libraries across the country. The library also supplements these services through membership in the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NNLM), which provides access to DOCLINE interlibrary loan of biomedical journals.

The library also maintains a collection of historical materials. These are displayed in a constantly rotating exhibit on the first floor.

Flagship Collections

Goodwin University’s Flagship Collections is an online repository that highlights university scholarship of various types: journal articles, dissertations, theses, creative writing, and professional presentations. The Flagship Collections are an open and permanent digital presence for the scholarly work of the Goodwin University community. Goodwin faculty, staff, and students are encouraged to publish work in this repository. The Flagship Collections also contain an online archive of historical materials related to the university.