2008 Woodie Awards
Library revamps resources to liken other WCC schools
School buys new electronic tools to aid research
Melissa Vlach
Issue date: 10/17/06 Section: News
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The Saint Mary's College library has been updating its electronic sources. Over the course of the 2006-07 school year, 26 new resources will become available for student use. Sixteen are currently available, while the others are expected to be ready by January.
"There's a couple of themes that are going through what we're purchasing this year," said Linda Wobbe, collection development librarian. "One is we're trying to build a significant online reference collection."
Wobbe expects students to utilize these online collections more than their printed counterparts.
"Reference books sit there, and students aren't going to use them if they're not online," she said.
The school has also bought several packages of online periodicals produced by different publishers. These sources cover a wide variety of topics, from science, to anthropology, to biographies, to poems. Many directly link students to the relevant articles.
"The full text is available in most cases for most of the things we've been buying recently," said Wobbe.
Where the full text is not available online, the databases can direct students to the correct source.
"Some of them are still indexes, like Film and Literature Review Index; it doesn't itself have full texts, but it indexes articles in the film and TV field," Wobbe said.
Another index is the Social Sciences Citation Index. This program leads students who haven't found an article to more useful sources on the subject.
Another new addition is a Federated Search Engine. This allows students to search multiple databases at once.
"It makes it possible to search that group of databases at once and not have to re-execute your search in each database. I think people are going to notice that," Wobbe said.
This tool should prove extremely helpful as the library continues to acquire databases. In two years, there will be more than 100.
"I think it's a two pronged thing. We have to have the content, but we also have to have a way to make it easier for people to search," Wobbe said.
Wobbe said she feels very optimistic about the additions.
"We're delighted to have something that will impact the students a lot," she said.