Introduction:

Female Student: Hi, my name is Jenny, and the first time that I came to the Jerome Library, I was like, whoa! How could there be so much space?

Male Student: The first time I came in the library ever, it was incredible. I came on a tour with my introductory English group, and it was incredible. There were all these floors. Everything was different than my normal public library.

Female Student: What am I supposed to be doing here?

Male Student: The normal public library was so simple. You just go find the book, one floor, easy as pie.

Librarian: Hi, my name is Colleen, and I'm a librarian here at Bowling Green State University. I'm going to be your tour guide here today to point out some of the differences between academic, school and public libraries. Hopefully that will prevent you from feeling like the students that you just heard from.

Major Differences:

Librarian: The first big difference is that on college campuses there are usually several different libraries. This happens to be the Jerome Library, which is our main library on campus, but we also have a library across campus, which is our science library.

Let's take a look at the map of Ohio State's campus. Unlike BGSU, there are 19 different libraries on their main campus alone. Many of these are specialized collections that are not used by all students.

Let's go inside of the Jerome Library and take a look around.

In a public or school library, you may be used to getting all the help that you need from one spot. But in an academic library, you're going to have to go to several different service points to get the help that you need. In this library alone we have 3 different service areas.

Finding books:

Librarian: Let's talk for a minute about finding books. In some high school libraries, there are still card catalogs in existence, but for most academic libraries, card catalogs are a thing of the past. In this particular library, we use an online catalog.

Let's take a look at our online catalog here at Bowling Green State University. Even though the catalogs at other universities may look different, they all work in generally the same way. Let's do a sample search.

I'm going to start out with a key word search since I'm not sure of the subject heading to use. I want to see if the library owns anything on extreme sports.

Here's a good one, let's take a look at Over the Edge: A Regular Guy's Odyssey in Extreme Sports. Notice the call number. It looks really different from the ones you've been using up until now because public and school libraries typically use a system that starts out with numbers. Ours starts out with letters. The call number is what you need to write down and take with you out to the collection.

Here's the collection where this book is located. The shelves are arranged alphabetically by the letters in the beginning part of the call number.

Finding Articles:

Librarian: Here we are in the magazine collection or as they're sometimes called periodicals or journals. Typically in an academic library the journals are arranged alphabetically by the title of the magazine, which means you don't need a call number, but what you do need to do is work on the computers first to get a citation to a particular article on your topic. You would spend an awful lot of time roaming around this collection trying to find an article that was relevant to you.

Go to the main library web page. Under the Finding Articles heading, click Research Databases. Here is a list of the various databases that will help you find specific articles.

Sometimes the article you need will be available for you to print directly from the computer, but sometimes you're going to have to use the print journal collection in your library.

Another thing that you need to know about using magazines in an academic library is that you'll have to make photocopies of those articles because you can't take the magazine out of the library. Oh, sounds like he didn't have any money to make a photo copy of that article. Excuse me.

Reserve Reading Room:

Librarian: Here we are in the Reserve Reading Room, a concept very unique to academic libraries. Your professors will put supplemental reading materials in this room for the whole classroom to access outside of class time. Now sometimes these materials will come in the form of book chapters, sometimes videos, sometimes articles from magazines that can are tricky to find. They're putting them in one spot so the whole class can have access to them. Now typically you can only have them for about two hours and they can't leave the building and at some institutions they even put them online so that you do have access 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Either way your professors will let you know how to access these materials.

O.k, that about wraps up the major physical differences between academic, school, and public libraries. I would just like to leave you with one last point. Make sure that you approach the reference librarians and ask questions of them. They're there to help you and you're going to have a lot of questions your first semester and throughout the four years that you're at a college or university. So, please ask them questions, that's what they're there for.

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