There are lots of students who graduate boasting about little very little they’ve visited the library, managing to get through their reading list with bookshops and google scholar alone. For others, the library is their last-resort location to grab a couple of key texts ahead of a panicked all-nighter, typically including a period of shouting at the photocopier when it claims they haven’t got enough credit to copy their entire textbook.
It should be obvious that it doesn’t need to be like this. If you use your university library to its full potential, it can be one of the most useful and enjoyable places you set foot in during your entire time at university. For the best students, going to the library is a pleasure, not a job, even when essay deadlines are approaching. The key obstacle most students face in developing this kind of relationship with their library is that they simply don’t know how to make the most of it. Therefore, experts of assignment writing services will explain what you can do to unlock your university library’s full potential.
Talk To The Librarians:
Some of the folks working in the library will be your fellow undergraduates, who can trundle trolleys around, restore books to shelves, and maybe occasionally tell someone off for bringing hot drinks into the photocopier room. You might be under the mistaken impression that this is what a librarian does. But there’s a reason that becoming a librarian typically requires a specialized degree, either a bachelor’s degree or a master’s, and it isn’t because it takes years to master the art of claiming “shush!” At exactly the right volume. Librarians are, in fact, highly trained professionals, who are skilled in research and finding information. That means that if there’s something you’re desperately trying to find out – the name of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s history teacher, say, or the year that chrysanthemums were first grown in Eire – asking a certified librarian might not be a bad place to start, at least after you’ve exhausted the obvious places, such as google.
Use Interlibrary Loans:
It can feel very grand, the first time you request an interlibrary loan. If you usually use books that are easily accessible, you might well find yourself feeling that as an undergraduate, you have no right to make so much trouble as to use the service. But remember: that’s what it’s there for! If your library doesn’t have a particular book, there’s no need to spend a fortune on amazon or fiddle around trying to scan it via the previews on google books. If it’s not outrageously rare, it’s very likely that a library somewhere can have it, and they will be able to send it to your library on request.
While most libraries will also allow a visiting student to browse their collections, the interlibrary loan system is much easier – no move for you – and can also include photocopies and scans as well as loans of the physical book or journal. Plus, there’s something very exciting about ordering a book from the opposite end of the country and having it arrive to facilitate your research. Many libraries can have arrangements not only with libraries in the same country but overseas as well.
Use Resources Other Than Books:
We’ve talked mostly about books in this article, but don’t forget that a modern library has many more resources than that. There are likely to be collections of DVDs, audio recordings, newspaper archives and a whole host of other multimedia that many students merely ignore. Some of this may prove useful for your course, and as it’s an underused resource, this is another opportunity to find sources that the other students on your course may have missed. The most useful resource other than books that your library has to offer you, however, is access to online journals.
This is a mainstay of most students’ research, though some don’t cotton on to it until later on in their courses. For virtually any subject you can think of, your university is maybe paying for access to a host of academic journals. Because of the faster turnaround time, they’re usually more up to date than the equivalent books. If there’s something that you’ve found on google scholar without full access, try and see if you can find the journal among those provided by your university library online – all the big ones are likely to be there, and so you can read the article at its source.