Monthly Archives: March 2012

Libraries will borrow from another library for you

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ILL book

Not all information is available for free on the Internet. Sometimes you simply need a book or journal article. So you go to the library. What if your library doesn’t have it? Simple. It has an office to borrow what you need from another library. It’s called interlibrary loan, or ILL. Yes, libraries borrow books from each other. They’ve been doing that for generations. Any library with more than a dozen or so employees probably has at least one person devoted to borrowing materials from another library and someone else devoted to lending materials to another library. Larger libraries typically … Continue reading →

Going on a “which” hunt: choosing between “that” and “which”

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student writing

Probably no one considers relative pronouns exciting. Maybe most people hardly consider them at all, but writers are not most people. Good writers must know the rules of good usage. Writers might on occasion have good reason to ignore the rules, but know them they must. So when should a writer use “that,” and when “which?” Although writers have been arguing for more than a century whether it matters, the most careful writers recognize that the rule is fairly simple. Use “that” to introduce a relative clause that defines or clarifies the meaning of the antecedent noun and “which” to … Continue reading →

Library staff: the paraprofessional

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Library circ desk

Not everyone who works in a library is a librarian. Librarians must have a masters degree in library science. Once upon a time, only librarians could perform certain tasks in a library, such as selecting materials for the collection, cataloging books, etc., and serving at the reference desk. Not any more. Increasingly, paraprofessional staff perform those tasks. Paraprofessionals may not have a library degree, but they have intensive on the job training and develop a high level of skill. Here is a brief overview of where you might be served in the library by a paraprofessional. Acquisitions Professional librarians still … Continue reading →

How to use online library databases

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online databases

A library catalog is a database as opposed to a search engine. Libraries offer many other databases for research besides the catalog. (Everyone does research, by the way, even though not everyone writes about the results.) In some ways you use them the same way you use the catalog, but there are important differences. I will illustrate using an online library database called Academic Search Complete. Academic Search Complete, like all databases, is organized by fields. That is, a complete record will contain separate fields for such things as author, title, subject, journal title, various standard numbers, etc. You can … Continue reading →