Brittny's Bookstore Story

A Bookstore Advisory Committee is Underway…

With over 500,000 different book titles carried at the Normandale bookstore, mistakes may occur. Here to help is a soon-to-be solution that should smooth things over.



First committee meeting took place on Oct. 18. Photo taken by Brittny Garrett



The Normandale Bookstore Advisory Committee has been reinvented to deal with issues that the bookstore has raised with students, faculty, and administration. Such annoyances may include no return without receipt; wrong textbook, textbook delay, textbook shortage, etc.

Students, bookstore employees, administration, and faculty members are active participants in the committee and head of it all is Kari Fisher.

 

Fisher has been a faculty member for about eight years, and decided that the committee needs to be brought back to life. She went in-depth about what she feels will come out of the committee, Fisher said, “There was a focus group that was formed about two years ago. They met twice for eight hours. They came up with an idea for a mission statement, and a target of areas that needed an improvement.”

 

She went on to say, “We are in the process of convening our first meeting. There, we would like to lead off of what the focus group had solved, handle state and national legislation, also deal with student issues, and faculty issues.”

 

Karen Hernandez has been managing the bookstore for almost ten years. I sat down with her to grasp more knowledge of the glitches that exist and how they can be solved. Hernandez said, “Overall we’ve had a high rate of customer satisfaction, we try to offer students the lowest way to purchase books online.”

 

She continued to say, “Always been, and always will be a small percentage of classes where there’s not enough books available. Periodically we make mistakes, we are human. Maybe we may order the wrong edition my book buyer buys.”

 

Hernandez added on the amount of textbooks that the bookstore handles, “There is over 1,300 classes and 500,000 different book titles carried here, we are dependent on faculty to give us the correct info so that the course materials are ordered for the class.”

 

A new Minnesota State Law has gone in effect as of July 1^st, 2010 that states that colleges are now required to post required materials for students to see what materials are needed to purchase once they sign up for that class. This will be in effect once the sign-up window is open for spring semester of 2011.

 

Brothers Alex and Andrew Sutton are PSEO students at Normandale. They expressed their opinions vaguely; “We got our textbooks for free through the bookstore at the web online pickup.”

When asked about the service that they received they both replied, “No problems, their fine. They were just doing their business.”

 

Into his third year of college, Johnny Nissen stressed his opinions on the bookstore. “I don’t like the fact that you can’t return a book when it’s a loose leaf type after the semester.”

He added, “I always mark the option of getting a used book, but then I always get a new one, I ordered them three weeks in advance.”

 

Normandale faculty member for twenty-two years Joyce Carey, hasn’t had much problems with the bookstore. “My aggravation isn’t so much with the bookstore but with prices on books. I know others have not, but my experience has been fine… I think the process of choosing a textbook has become so complicated.” She then added, “The job that they have has gotten more difficult for how many textbooks there are, and my biggest complaint has to do with editions that change. Every two years publishing companies put out new editions, this makes it incredibly expensive for students, and makes it unable for them to sell them back.”

 



Photo taken by Brittny Garrett



The Normandale Bookstore Committee will hold it’s first meeting on Monday Oct. 18, and every Monday after. To request more information contact Kari Fisher at Kari.Fisher@normandale.edu.