When I was growing up, I loved to read the World Book Encyclopedia. I suppose you could say I was a word nerd. It was not unusual for me climb up onto the desk to pull down two or three of the hefty, green and white volumes off the shelf, then go back and forth looking up different topics just for fun. I might look for a picture of a particular city, or read about the climate of South America,…
I was given an assignment this week—to list all the library’s subscriptions from a particular journal publisher, then rank them according to their priority for TAMU-CC. The library subscribes to more than 2,700 of this publisher’s journals. How would you go about determining the relative importance of each one?Obviously, your personal favorite journal should be at the top of the list, right? (Hang on, I’ll say more about that later.) But what about the rest?As it happens, librarians like to…
Hey, classical music lovers… Did you know that the Mary and Jeff Bell Library provides access to a database of over 150,000 albums? That’s right, Naxos Music Library (NML) has a huge catalog of (primarily) classical streaming music, and it’s freely available to all TAMU-CC students, faculty, and staff. There are several ways you can select something to listen to. You can search for a specific work, of course. Or you can click the “People” link from the menu on the left…
The question In a recent librarians’ meeting, a question came up about the way the library buys books. The Bell Library, like many academic libraries, has traditionally purchased books through two main methods—title-by-title selection, and auto-shipments from a book vendor, based on a profile we set up with them. This second method, called an “approval plan,” would be sort of like setting up your Amazon account to automatically send you any new books that match your interests. The question that…
The construction area next to the Ask Us Desk isn't the only big change happening at the library right now. Library staff are gearing up for a “behind the scenes” change that you probably won't notice, but that we hope will help us deliver even better service to all of you. The software we use to manage library operations—checking books in and out, the library catalog, journal holdings, tracking orders for new books and other materials, etc.—was designed with print…