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Barnard FLI Partnership Library

Two brown bear paws touching pads to hold or shake hands; brown circle around the paws reads: Barnard FLI Partnership Library, Barnard Library @ Milstein Center

Sign Up

Any undergraduate student who identifies as low-income and/or first-generation and attends Barnard College, Columbia College, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, or the School of General Studies may check out materials from both the Barnard or Columbia FLI Partnership Libraries. To receive borrowing privileges, students must complete the private online FLI Partnership Libraries Access Form. The information provided will be uploaded to a confidential and secure file that updates your circulation permissions.

Check Out Books

Once the form is submitted, allow one business day for your account to update. Now you can check out FLI materials from the Barnard and Columbia FLI Libraries for an entire semester at a time for the rest of your time as a student.

To locate materials, use CLIO and search for a combination of the following: "fli library" AND "the title of the book or author name". Once you find the book in CLIO, use the call number (ex. PR2802.A2 E84 1998) to locate the book in the FLI Library on the 4th floor of the Milstein Center. Now you can take the book and immediately check it out at the Circulation & Help Desk. Alternatively, you can request the book for pick-up at your desired location by clicking on the "FLI pick-up" button.

Confused? Come ask for help at the Circulation & Help Desk. We would be happy to walk you through the process.

Please note that this is one of several ways you might access materials for your courses; for a full guide, please also refer to the Find & Borrow Course Materials guide.

 

Barnard FLI Partnership Library Mission and History

The Barnard FLI Partnership Library was created in collaboration with first-generation and/or low-income undergraduate students, and the collection is maintained in partnership with FLI students. The FLI Library is part of the Barnard Library collection and is located on the 4th floor of the Milstein Center. We prioritize expensive textbooks, such as those required for STEM courses or literary anthologies. Our goal is to provide any book necessary for any class required for any given major. Students and faculty can help to fill in the gaps by using our FLI Partnership Library Student Request form or our FLI Partnership Library Faculty Request Form.

The foundation of the Barnard FLI Partnership Library is grounded in four values: 

  • Equity: This collection is created by and for first-generation and/or low-income students to partially address an equity gap and work toward low-cost or no-cost access to courses.
  • Partnership: The Barnard FLI Partnership Library was founded as and continues to be a collaboration between the Barnard Library, Columbia FLI Network student organization, and Barnard SGA. The collection is also a sibling collection to the Columbia FLI Partnership Library, located on the 3rd floor of Butler Library.
  • Privacy: It is crucial to us that students can check out materials from the collections without being required to publicly identify themselves as low-income and/or first-generation students.
  • Accessibility: We want to ensure that the process of checking out a book from the Barnard FLI Partnership Library is as efficient and simple as possible.

Learn more about FLI students at Barnard and Columbia: The Hawa Tunkara '21 FLI Story Collection contains 25 oral histories of FLI students conducted in 2020-2021, and is housed in Barnard's Archives and Special Collections.

Faculty, for information on making your course materials available at no cost to your students, please visit the Faculty Guide to Course Reserves & Barnard FLI Partnership Library.

Frequently Asked Questions

The formal definition of a first-generation college student is a student whose parents did not complete a bachelor’s degree. However, at the Barnard Library, we consider a first-generation student to be any student who may self-identify as not having prior exposure to or knowledge of navigating institutions such as Barnard and Columbia and may need additional support. For example, this may include students whose parents attended a four-year college in an educational system outside of the United States, or students who have only had close contact to people with minimal college experience.

There is no income level that determines eligibility for students to check out materials from the Barnard FLI Partnership Library. However, low-income students typically have little to no expected parent contribution as part of their financial aid package. 

Thank you for thinking of supporting the Barnard FLI Partnership Library!

To donate to the fund to purchase needed textbooks, visit Giving to Barnard and designate your gift for the "Barnard FLI Partnership Library." Thank you for making course texts more accessible for Barnard students!

Before donating any materials to the Barnard FLI Partnership Library, please reach out to library@barnard.edu with a list of books you would like to donate. We will review the titles and reconnect with you. Please ensure that any book(s) you're emailing about meet the following guidelines. 

The Barnard FLI Partnership Library accepts books of these types:

  • Books in good physical condition
  • STEM, social science, or language textbooks, or test prep books used in current or upcoming Columbia and/or Barnard courses

The Barnard FLI Partnership Library is unable to accept books of these types:

  • Books that are in poor physical condition–including missing pages, broken spines, or significant staining
  • Books that are heavily annotated, written in, or highlighted in pen, highlighter, or other permanent markers
  • Books that are not being used in current or upcoming Columbia and/or Barnard courses
  • Novels, creative essays, and other non-textbook formats

Contact Liam Adler (ladler@barnard.edu), Barnard Library Director of Collections Strategy & Library Operations, and Destiny Arias (da3122@barnard.edu), Barnard Library Student Associate for the Barnard FLI Partnership Library, to start a conversation. We look forward to hearing from you!