Moore Library reshapes amid ongoing budget cuts

By Caroline Haviland

To push through financial and faculty-loss challenges that plagued many sectors on Rider’s campus in recent years, Moore Library has undergone a reevaluation of its operations to optimize its performance, despite being understaffed. 

The library’s most recent setback came when former professor-librarian Heather Dalal was a part of the mass faculty layoffs in December due to the university’s critical financial condition. With her departure, Moore Library was left with five librarians, including Dean of the Library Sharon Whitfield. 

Whitfield, who was appointed to the position in July 2025 as the first librarian dean since 2017, said she tries to view these obstacles in a positive light and make it an opportunity to reassess traditional offerings and shape the library more innovatively. 

She said, “We’re actually not pulling back, we’re pushing forward.”

Moving away from a “traditional library” model

To get a better understanding of what brings value to the university library, Whitfield said she set a “framework to live by” with three categories: instruction, access and outreach. 

With this structure, the library’s faculty decided to put certain services on hold, such as its incorporation of virtual reality into pedagogy, due to limited resources prohibiting them from performing the service to the optimal degree. 

The reason for this, she said, is to focus their attention on areas where they can excel. 

Budget cuts have also resulted in a loss of access to databases, which were decided through a cost-per-use metric that helped the library see if it was getting ideal usage on each resource. Some of the databases removed pertained to the Modern Language Association, economics literature and nursing literature. 

Even with these reductions, Whitfield said Moore Library has continued to expand its collaborations, like working with the 100-level research class required for all undergraduates. This partnership involves each student receiving about 10 information literacy modules to complete, with the hope that they would understand and utilize researching skills better. 

These joint efforts can bring fruitful results, Professor-Librarian Melissa Hofmann said, as they help both students and faculty alike. 

“We can help faculty make better research assignments so they’re students are actually learning what they want them to learn with the information landscape changing so fast,” Hofmann said. 

The Academic Success Center has also joined with Moore Library to offer writing tutoring support to students from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Mondays and 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Thursdays. The objective of these initiatives, Whitfield said, is to expand outreach to the Rider community to let faculty, staff and students know what the library can offer. 

Upon reviewing data detailing overall usage of the library in fall 2025, that goal seemed to be met, as Whitfield said there was a 54% increase in comparison to fall 2024. 

“Nothing makes a librarian happier than for you to hear noise because that means people are in the building, hopefully they’re studying together, working out problems together,” Whitfield said. “When it’s quiet and no one is here, that’s the worst thing for a librarian.” 

When a student now walks into Moore Library, they will no longer find a librarian sitting at the reference desk waiting to be approached. Instead, Whitfield said she prefers her librarians to be walking around, getting outside and being involved in the community to shape how the library is perceived on campus. Students can also schedule one-on-one appointments with a librarian on their website to get the assistance they need.

“During that reshaping and reforming, I think we’re moving away from just being a traditional library to being more innovative,” Whitfield said. 

Challenges to Solutions 

A primary reason for these changes in operations comes from a significant cut to the library’s budget. In an April 2024 article published by The Rider News, Moore Library’s budget was reported to be sitting at $1.25 million in 2019. That number got cut by 20% in 2021, 30% in 2022 and an additional 20% in 2024, making it half of what it once was. 

The budget now is undergoing “recalibration,” Whitfield said, as their existing budget model was developed based on former Rider President Gregory Dell’Omo’s administration’s projections, which no longer align with the current university environment. 

Hofmann said Whitfield has been successful at creating improvements in the building’s space with minimal cost, such as making more study rooms, taking out shelves to create additional seating and using their funds to install power outlets in the center of numerous sitting areas. 

However, with a decreasing budget and less librarians, the same workload has been left to those remaining at Moore Library.

When she started at Rider in 2008, Hofmann said Moore Library housed 10 librarians. Over the years, many of them left to pursue other career opportunities, but they were not replaced. 

Hofmann said this has made her and her colleagues “more generalists and less experts,” as they have become liaisons to differing schools across campus, instead of specific departments. This has increased the amount of collection development and research instruction each librarian must complete in order to best support the curriculum. 

Whitfield said in order to combat the heavier workload, the library has resorted to automating certain processes through artificial intelligence to avoid the staff from feeling burnt out. 

One of these processes being assisted with artificial intelligence includes a diversity, equity and inclusion audit on the library’s social work collection, but Whitfield said the artificial intelligence work is always “human centered.”

“I don’t think technology could exist without a human factor. Anything we’re driving with AI and workflows makes the process work more effectively,” Whitfield said. 

With all of these adjustments made over the years, Whitfield said she commends her colleagues’ willingness to push forward, and signified their positions in a single sentence: “Librarians are people who are willing to embrace change.”