The Rising Scholar Program at Merced College serves Valley State Prison and Central California Women's Facility prisons, located in Chowchilla, Central Valley of California.
Merced College offers Associate for Transfer Degrees in both colleges, and are pipeline programs for Baccalaureate Degrees at Fresno State and other state colleges.
Merced College Library immediately realized the challenges our Rising Scholar students faced accessing academic level research: there is no internet available in the prison campuses, and the level of information available through the prison library is limited. In order to do robust critical thinking and transformative reading, students would need those sources to support their classes.
Leaning into public library spaces like the New York Public Library who regularly serves inmate populations, we drafted a policy for serving incarcerated students, and a form for research requests. The form provides space for reframing their prompt or information need, then a space for asking or inquiry, and they must identify the source type they want. Myself and one other part time librarian then read each request, intuit their research request through the scope of their assignment/information need, and interpret the information narrative to print for them. Most of the time I try to include referential information for iterative searching, and then multiple articles on their topic(s).
Building relationships with RS faculty has been essential: I have worked with many of the RS faculty before, either one to one, and through a workshop, and they communicate that the requests limit to two topics/issues within the scope of the assignment. Depending on the complexity of question usually dictates the number of articles I print.
My most often utilized resources include Gale Ebooks, NexisUni, EBSCO EBooks, Literature Resource Center (Gale) and others. We have only begun to utilize ProQuest Ebook Central and it has proven helpful.
Here is a link to a newsletter, Outlook, reporting some of my findings: https://cclibrarians.org/outlook/april-2020/academic-library-prison-higher-education-merced-college-valley-state-prison-and
