Library Services
The Stockwell-Mudd Libraries make available to students and
faculty approximately 550,000 books and non-print items, over 650
current print journal subscriptions and more than 1,000 electronic
journal subscriptions. The collections are distributed between two
buildings connected by an enclosed walkway: The Stockwell Memorial
Library (1938) and the Seeley G. Mudd Learning Center (1980). The Mudd
building houses the Reference, Circulation, Special Collections and
Technical Services departments; the Madelon Stockwell Turner Memorial
Room; video, language and music viewing and listening facilities; a
computer laboratory/classroom; the Foundation for Undergraduate
Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity (FURSCA), and the Academic
Skills Center. The Stockwell building houses the periodicals collection
and extensive collections of U.S. government documents, maps, and
foreign and domestic newspapers.
The library's online catalog is
available to students and faculty from public computers located
throughout the library, from across campus and from homes and offices
anywhere in the world via the Internet. The online catalog provides
instant access to the library's books, special collections, periodical
holdings, and numerous online indexes and full-text sources.
The library
contains many attractive areas for study--classrooms, seminar rooms for
groups, carrels for individual study, and comfortable seating, with
coffee and snacks, in the library lounge. The Friends of the Stockwell-Mudd Libraries sponsor a variety of displays and programs,
such as readings and lectures. These programs provide a public forum for
authors reading from their works and for speakers making presentations
on a variety of topics.
The book collections, developed over more than a
century, are extensive and provide support across the curriculum. A
large collection of classic and popular motion pictures on videotape and
DVD is available. The library provides an interlibrary loan service that
utilizes an international computer network and electronic transmission
to locate and rapidly retrieve materials not in the local collections.
In addition, the library is a participant in InMich, in which patrons
directly request materials from other participating libraries.
The
Special Collections department contains the College's archives, United
Methodist Church West Michigan Conference archives, student honors
theses and a rare books collection. These are closed stacks, but access
to these collections and research assistance are available by
appointment.
The library staff is highly skilled and conscious of their
public service role and mission. The libraries are open 114 hours a
week. Reference assistance is available at the Mudd Reference Desk 53
hours a week. Librarians are available to help students develop their
research projects and find appropriate materials. A wide range of
up-to-date reference sources in electronic and print formats are
available for consultation. Students and faculty have access to a large
number of electronic full-text and bibliographic databases.
A strong
program of library instruction has been developed in which librarians
teach not only the use of resources in the library, but also how to gain
access to information in society generally. The library offers a variety
of library instruction sessions. The general library orientation session
and the research strategy session are two of the more popular offerings.
Librarians provide course-specific and assignment-specific instruction
sessions in which relevant reference tools, appropriate research
strategies and the evaluation of sources are discussed. Librarians work
with faculty to tailor these sessions to the specific information and
research needs of the students in their classes. The library also offers
a basic library skills course, Library Science 201: Library Research
Methods. This one-half unit course, taught by a librarian, introduces
students to the organization and evaluation of library materials and
information resources.
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