Foley Library Office of the Dean
Foley Library faculty and staff are excited to welcome you to our space, whether in-person or virtually. As an academic library in the second quarter of the 21st century, Foley is here to support your learning, development, and generation of new knowledge in our society.
The academic library has historically been called the “heart of the campus” and yet in today’s world of networks, I would suggest that it’s more likely a key node in the circuitry of the campus, offering multiple varied elements that are critical to both the student and faculty experiences.
Here at Foley, we offer much needed physical space for both collaborative and quiet work, including the connectable screens and circulating chargers and laptops to facilitate that work. Additionally, our space functions as a platform for displays and programs to support well-being and growth mindset on our campus.
We offer access to resources in our direct collection as well as the circulating collections of our 39 consortial partner institutions through the Orbis Cascade Alliance and a large number of libraries beyond that through our Interlibrary Loan services. We license streaming films for course materials, electronic journals, and aggregated databases of resources. Additionally, we curate and make accessible tangible archival materials and digital collections of materials created at Gonzaga and/or donated to the library.
We offer direct support in your research and scholarship processes through instruction sessions and small group or individual consultations in navigating and evaluating the collections through the library as well as the information overload at our fingertips through the internet. In collaboration with our building partners, including the Center for Student Academic Success and the Writing Center, we can also offer aligned support in iterative processes such as academic writing or contextualized learning.
We are here to support your generation of scholarly and creative outputs in multiple formats through our support for digital scholarship methods and consultation and can help you understand your rights as a creator under U.S. Copyright. We are also here to help you consider whether and how to preserve your outputs for access and longevity.
We love to discuss the economics of information and the scholarly publishing ecosystems of the various disciplines here at Gonzaga. From Open Access and Creative Commons to Transformative Agreements, Text Mining clauses, and AI in licenses, we are here to help our whole campus community be aware and discursive about our approaches to changing landscapes for access to information. With awareness our ability to align our actions with our Mission fulfillment are improved.
And we see our core discipline – information organization and description – as an evolving and rich discipline in its own. From considerations of inclusive description practices to evolving technology for creating multiple access points to our resources, we are engaged in multiple venues with thought leaders and collectives developing best practices. Our work is not undermined by the growth of the internet, or digital publishing, or Artificial Intelligence; it is made richer and more complex by these developments and we are excitedly engaging across them.
We look forward to collaborating with you!
Heather James
Heather James, M.S.I.S., M.F.A., serves as the Dean of Foley Library since August 2024; she was the Interim Dean of Library for ten months prior. Heather joined Gonzaga as the Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources at Foley Library in September 2020. Prior to Gonzaga, Heather was the Coordinator for Digital Programs at Marquette University’s Raynor Library, leading the institutional repository, data management services, and copyright guidance for the campus. She began at Marquette as Assistant Librarian with liaison roles for English, Chemistry, Biology, and Biochemistry after having worked at University of Minnesota, Morris as the Instruction and Circulation Librarian and having been an ARL Career Enhancement Program Fellow at Odegaard Library, University of Washington.
