The following information is provided to answer some of the most frequently asked library questions of PSU teaching faculty.

Course Reserves

Faculty members may place any library materials or personal copies of items on reserve for their classes. Reserve materials may include books, articles, chapters, reports, scores, audio or video recordings, DVD’s, etc. in compliance with federal Copyright Laws. You may designate a Reserve loan period for two hours, one day, or three days.

Please find the reserve guidelines and request form here.

Requesting Library Materials for Purchase

The Library strongly encourages teaching faculty to make recommendations for adding materials to our collections that support teaching and student research in their classes and disciplines. We provide each teaching department with a library faculty liaison to whom you can channel requests for material purchases or any other inquiries about departmental library needs. Requests for books or other media can be made at anytime to your library liaison via a simple e-mail, note, marked publisher’s flyer, or bibliography list. There’s no need to check our holdings before hand. Requests for items costing $400 or more, or for online resources, are discussed and evaluated by the library faculty as a whole, but routine book requests are processed automatically. Find your department’s faculty liaison here.

Requests for adding journal subscriptions are also subject to a review and evaluation process by the library faculty. This is done to consider issues such as current online availability, research value to specific courses and programs, cost, and ready access to indexing and abstracting. Please contact your subject liaison for help in completing the online Journal Request Form.

Library Instruction

No longer a quaint notion of learning how to search the catalog or the intricacies of the Library of Congress Classification, library instruction is more critical now than ever to help students understand how a state-of-the-art academic library serves as a gateway to a universe of information resources in traditional and online formats, whether located within its walls or on the web. Lamson Librarians have created a multi-tier system of teaching students, from individual consultation at the Reference Desk, to creating print and online research guides, to delivering classroom presentations for individual courses.

A key element is letting us know about your students’ assignments and research projects. We encourage instructors to send a copy of a current assignment to their liaison via campus or e-mail, so we know in advance of what students will be looking for. Or, talk to a librarian at the reference desk (535-2455) about the availability of resources or best strategies for an assignment. Please refer to the Ideal Library Assignment factsheet for more detailed tips on how you can help us most effectively help your students benefit the most from our library’s excellent resources.

A significant part of our instruction program takes place in the First Year Seminar program. In this course we provide detailed library orientation via an online Library Handbook, and classroom instruction to each First Year Seminar section covering basic resources and research strategies built around the topics central to each of the seminar “Questions”.

If you would like to discuss scheduling a classroom presentation by a librarian, contact your subject/department liaison in the library, or call or e-mail Lissa Zinfon. To reasonably accommodate other teaching commitments, our daily reference schedule, and other professional responsibilities, we do ask for sufficient lead time when setting up a library instruction session, particularly in the case of a new presentation, where more preparation time is needed. We request that faculty contact us three weeks in advance of the time they would like a class scheduled. It is also important to have several alternative dates, since we are increasingly sharing the use of our primary Library Instruction classroom with others, and want to make sure we can schedule you at your optimum time. We also require that the course instructor be present for the Library Instruction session. We think it reinforces the value and importance of the session to the students, and makes sure that the instructor receives the same information as the students.

We do welcome faculty bringing their classes on their own to the library for independent research, but request that you notify the librarian at the Reference Desk in advance, so that we know there are no conflicting groups or activities at that time that would interfere with your students’ unhampered and efficient access to resources or assistance.

Online Resources

For your own research, as well as that of your students, the Library subscribes to over 40 periodical databases covering all key disciplines. From the Databases link under the Find menu on the Library Homepage, you will see an alphabetical list of all online databases the Library subscribes, most of which are periodical databases. Almost all of these databases offer partial or comprehensive full-text access as well. When you are off-campus, remember to log on via the my.plymouth portal, so that you have unimpeded access to all our subscription databases.

Note also that just above the Databases link, under Resources by Subject, we have organized databases, along with other key resources, by specific subject areas.

For access to the largest database of holdings in academic, research, and special libraries in the U.S., including the Library of Congress and several major international libraries, you can connect to WorldCat directly from the Databases list. WorldCat contains over 62 million records of cataloged books, serials, media, datafiles, websites, music scores, and archival material.

If you are looking for access to Books in Print, this database is available from the FirstSearch system — with many full-text reviews. A chat with the Reference Desk (535-2455) will provide you with the FirstSearch authorization code and password. At the FirstSearch welcome page, click on List All Databases, then scroll down to find Books In Print.

Document Delivery/Interlibrary Loan

Any specific book or article from a journal we don’t own (or have online access to) may be requested through the Library’s Document Delivery/Interlibrary Loan service on our website. These privileges are available at no cost to all full and part-time students, all PSU faculty, staff, and alumni who have a borrowing card.

Types of materials that can typically be borrowed include:

• Books
• Theses & Dissertations
• Music scores
• Copies of individual periodical articles

Types of materials that usually cannot be borrowed through ILL include:

• Books we own, but are checked out
• Whole periodical issues
• Recent newspapers
• Reference books
• Bulky, fragile, or rare materials
• In the case of sound or visual media, many libraries will now lend videos, CD’s, or DVD’s, unlike in the past. The exception would be vinyl LP’s.

Make sure you are using the my.Plymouth portal to initiate a request. When you go to the Document Delivery/Interlibrary Loan link, click on the ILL FAQ for additional details about delivery time and other suggestions.

For assistance, contact Joyce Bruce in the Document Delivery/Interlibrary Loan Office, (535- 2576), or the Reference Librarian (535-2455).

Other Library Questions

For all other questions about specific Library services, resources, or policies, or for suggestions on other helpful information we should include here, please do not hesitate to contact any of our librarians and/or staff.