Welcome to the University of Michigan and to an experience unique of its kind. An integral part of your experience at the university is going to be the library and its vast resources. Learning how to get the most out of those available resources is very important and I’m here to try to walk you through simple basic tips that will get you comfortable navigating the MLibrary. Having said that, getting to know everything at this stage is not the expectation of this brief article. Self-exploration and diving is the way to go after this.
To begin with, the first thing you will visit the MLibrary website for is searching for books. In the search space on the website, you would need to hit on the word “Catalog” first, and then you can choose to search by a keyword, title, subject, call number, …etc. Then, you type in what you are looking for e.g. the subject chemistry. This will get you into a results page where you will have a lot of icons to filter your search results and order them by date or relevance. You can as well do another search.
Now suppose you found the book you are looking for, what’s next? Under the title of each book in the list you will notice some information on the location of the book (i.e. which library has it), its status (on shelf, checked out) and its call number. If you want to check out this book, then if the books is on shelf, all you need to do is to write down the call number e.g. QD 31.2 .C79 and go find it in the library that has it. All libraries have maps for the stacks and organizations of books according to call numbers. Understanding how to read call numbers is the way to an easy search for books. This might be daunting at the beginning but with time you will enjoy it. And remember, that at circulation desks there are people who enjoy helping you and will walk you through this process if you could not manage it yourself. If you are not in a hurry and don’t want to go through this, you can hit on the Get this icon. With this, the library staff in around 24 hours will process your request and according to where you wanted to pick the book, they will send you a notification to come collect your book. If the book is checked out, you can put a hold on it by hitting the Get this icon. This will send a recall to the patron having the book asking him to return the book with a new due date. As soon as the book is returned they will notify you to go collect the book at location you opted to get the book at.
As a senior undergraduate or graduate student, you will need to read peer-reviewed scientific articles. This time you need to hit in the home page of the library website on ArticlesPlus. You can search by a complete known title, part of a title, an author name, a subject heading or a keyword. After typing in your search entry, this will lead you to this page. As you can see, next to each article, there is an MGet it icon which is what you will hit on if you need to get the article. Sometimes, you might not find the article you are looking for in the MLibrary, what can you do then? This is what I will begin with in Library tips part 2. Stay tuned!
Rasheed Alameer
Graduate Student
Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology
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