Set up a library session for your class!

For those of you teaching Gender and Women's Studies classes that have a research assignment, I encourage you to bring your class in to the library to get your students on their way to finding appropriate materials for their research. This works best if they have already chosen a topic for their research and they know that they will need a certain amount of non-free Web sources. I usually spend about 1.25 to 1.5 hours with them, showing them our main resources and having them find those on their topic, but I can make this shorter or longer, as you wish. I will send you information on our revised tutorial ResearchPath, as soon as it is up. ResearchPath will be replacing Searchpath with an updated style, but it will still cover the basic research methods. We have encouraged instructors to assign this before bringing their class in to see us, especially if the students have not had any library instruction. Please contact me at maira.bundza@wmich.edu to set up a time and date. The library classroom calendar is filling up quickly.

New Library Catalog

For the past year we have been experimenting with and tweaking a new form of our library catalog which has become the default way to search our catalog. It is meant to be more of a discovery tool. I am thrilled that it no longer gets hung up on articles (a, an, the) in front of a title, lets you search for an author either first or last name first, and offers "did you mean" spelling suggestions. It is easier to narrow your search by format (books, e-books, videos, etc.), location, author, year. It lets you create lists of favorites or to tag items in the catalog. It still does searches by author, title, subject, etc., but if for some reason you don't like this new interface, or there was something the old catalog did that this new one doesn't quite do the way you would like, the old "classic" catalog is still there for you to use.