Charles Priore: The Science Librarian

Charles Priore is the Associate Librarian for Natural Sciences for both St. Olaf and Carleton College . At St. Olaf, Charles serves four departments, including biology, chemistry, physics, and math. He is also responsible for collection development, instruction, and much, much more.

In his twenty-two years here, Charles has seen Glasoe Science Library change and grow in many different ways. When Charles first began his position at St. Olaf, online databases, indexes, and websites did not exist. Rather, students in the sciences conducted their research by consulting volumes of paper indices. In fact, there were hundreds of volumes of paper indexes, and using them was frequently tedious and cumbersome. But over the years, the science library has been able to provide increasingly advanced resources for science students which aid in the research process. For example, St. Olaf was the second institution in Minnesota (Carleton was first) to subscribe to Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA), one of our most popular and useful online indexes to journals and literature.

Charles is particularly proud of St. Olaf's subscription to Endnote, an invaluable tool for students conducting research in the sciences. One major benefit to using Endnote is that it formulates bibliographic citations into whichever citation style the student prefers. Charles has received two grants to integrate Endnote with his instruction. He and John L. Giannini, Associate Professor of Biology, have jointly published an article which outlines and describes how they were able to successfully fulfill the challenge of the first grant. The article, “Integrating Bibliographic Software, Database Searching, and Molecular Modeling in an Introductory Biology Course,” appears in the March/April 2007 volume of the Journal of College Science Teaching.

Charles has enjoyed his career, and he loves having close interaction with students. He finds it especially fulfilling when he can connect students to information, help them encounter new technologies, and witness them discover new career paths in science.