FOR STUDENTS

1. Help you locate books and articles on your topic. We’ll do this using both print and electronic sources.

2. Help you narrow and focus your topic, and lead you to think of synonyms and similar phrases to use when searching.

3. Show you ways to evaluate the articles that you find.

4. Help you correctly cite your sources.

5. Gather sources together on a cart for your class project so that they are all in one place for you to use.

6. Give you a designed, step-by-step procedure to conduct research.

7. Email articles about your topic to you after you have left the library.

8. Show you how to choose databases that are best suited fro your topic.

9. Contact your teacher when there is a question about the assignment that is difficult to understand.

10. Get you to the best sources quickly and save you time.

FOR INSTRUCTORS

What Librarians Do:  Do You Know?

Librarians find information whether it is in a book, a journal article, a database, a Web site, or wherever, in whatever format it might be.  Librarians do electronic searches for patrons or with patrons.  All patrons have to do is ask!  They can ask by phone, by fax, by e-mail, via our library Web site, or even by stopping by the reference desk in the library and talking to one of us.  Please come talk to us!

Librarians teach.  We will teach special library instruction classes, information literacy skills needed in your regular courses, workshops in departmental meetings or seminars.  We will come almost anywhere at almost any time.  Really!  We teach database searching, navigating the Web for appropriate resources, and how to use full-text electronic resources.  Also MLA documentation for all that gathered information, and how to write about it without plagiarizing.  We provide an orientation so that everyone is familiar with the wide range of information resources available to them from their library and how to access it all from wherever they are.

Another thing we librarians do for our patrons:  we maintain lists of our available electronic databases and journals.  And librarians provide access to information via books, journals (either print of electronic), and audiovisual materials to everyone who comes into the library.  And we provide tons of information to many who do not even come into the library.  And what the Richland Library does not have, we will get for you.  Maintaining an effective, efficient, mostly free interlibrary loan system is just another important service librarians provide.  And we do buy new materials for the collection here.  If your students aren’t finding what they need at the library, just talk to our collection development librarian, who will research available titles and purchase those that support your curriculum as budget allows.

We will find and deliver any odd items you might want from the library.  We will complete the partial citations you need to include in your grant proposal.  We will help you design a meaningful, worthwhile library assignment for your class.  We will find useful and informative graphics for your presentations.  We will find statistics.  We will locate grant information.  We will get the “Instructions for Authors” for the journal in which you want to publish andhelp you decide which journal that is.

Richland librarians also developed ASAP, an online tool for students to plan and manage their research projects.  Come check out ASAP on our Web site!  We teach this tool in our information literacy classes.  Speaking of our classes, we teach three of them on a regularly scheduled basis (Intro to the Library, Electronic Research, and MLA), and we provide Information Literacy Certificates to students who attend all three.  Sounds like something you could give extra credit points for, doesn’t it?

So give us a call, give us a visit.  Get to know us and what we do.  We’re here, and we want to know you!