Thanks to Kelly Addleman for another interesting article. This link takes you to the Denver Public Library site. Plug in the information on the services you make use of and it will show you how much you get for each tax dollar you spend on the library. Although it is only for Denver it gives a good picture of what you get for your tax dollars.
February 2009 Archives
Governor Ed Rendell's latest cost-saving suggestion:
State Library to Shed 51 Jobs, Leaving Staff of 6
And The Wall Street Journal's:
Wall Street Journal Librarian a Victim of Cutbacks
Thanks to Kelly Addleman for this article.
A few suggestions for students doing research:
1. Don’t rely strictly on Google or Google Scholar to find items that may be beneficial to you. As a matter of fact, why not make use of the library subscriptions first? Try EBSCOhost, SAGE Online Journals, Journal Finder, Literature Resource Center, etc. You might be amazed to see what the library can make available to you—for free.
2. Journal Finder will not only tell you if an item is available in Reeves Memorial Library but will also tell you the format: paper, online (and in what database), or in microform.
3. Familiarize yourself with Seton Hill’s rules for requesting ILLs. They can be found here, Official ILL Policies. This could keep you from making a costly mistake.
4. Ask the librarians about copyright law as it applies to requesting journal articles, e.g. For any given journal or periodical title within a given year, the library is allowed, under CONTU (National Commission on new Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works) guidelines, to obtain an institutional total of 5 photocopies of articles published within the past 5 years of the current year. If more are requested there is a $35 copyright usage charge which is passed on to the patron making the request.
5. Copyright fees also need to be paid if the limit of requesting 3 articles from one issue of a journal is exceeded. Once again these fees would be the responsibility of the patron making the requests.
6. Think through your research needs and interpret your results. If you do a general search you can find many more items than you can possibly review. By working to limit the number of your search hits by carefully determining exactly what information you are looking for you can come up with a much more manageable list of hits. And they will probably be more closely related to your intended topic.
7. Talk to a librarian—you’d be surprised at what we are trained to do. Contrary to what some people think we went to graduate school to learn more than how to shelve books. Many of us took quite a few classes on locating information.
Grammarians of the world unite!
If you read the posts I made of raising Grom this past summer you may be interested on this update that I received. They certainly grow quickly!
