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In time for summer, Thomas Cooper Library has introduced several new services aimed at making faculty research a bit more convenient.
"Time is important to faculty, and the new services will help them maximize their time and research productivity," said Tom McNally, Thomas Cooper Library director.
A new paging service allows faculty to contact the library to hold a book, which staff will retrieve from the stacks and place at the Circulation Desk. For requests placed before noon, books will be available by 5 p.m.; requests placed after noon will be ready by noon the following business day. Books can also be delivered to another University library. More information on paging can be found online at www.sc.edu/library/pubserv/pagerequest.html.
Columbia campus faculty also can get books delivered from any of the Columbia campus libraries. Library staff will retrieve the items, check them out to a faculty member's library account, and deliver them to a department office. Learn more at www.sc.edu/library/pubserv/facbookfaq.html.
A scan and deliver service supplies articles from Thomas Cooper Library stacks directly to faculty members' desktops on any of the University's eight campuses.
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| Beki Gettys |
"You can search multiple databases simultaneously with the Gamecock Power Search engine, but not every article is available in full-length text electronically," said reference librarian Beki Gettys. "If the article is available in printed form in Thomas Cooper Library, we will scan it and send it to you via scan and deliver."
The service is also available to students registered with the Columbia campus distance education office who live outside of Richland and Lexington counties and those registered with the Office of Student Disability Services. To learn more about the Scan and Deliver service, go to ill2.tcl.sc.edu/docdel/default.html.
Faculty can also take advantage of the new "My Account" features of the library Catalog that allow multiple ongoing searches and e-mail alerts.
"You can maintain up to 25 searches for new library resources on different topics. Whenever we acquire new materials on one of those topics, the system will automatically notify you by e-mail," Gettys said.
The new services are part of an evolution of library technology and customer service, McNally said. "These are services that we knew faculty would want," he said. "When we built our library annex years ago, we realized that it was easier to scan and e-mail an article from a requested volume than to deliver the actual volume--so our scan and deliver service is a natural extension of that. We were already delivering books to the library location most convenient to the faculty member, so delivering it to their office is the logical next step."
While changes already have been made in Thomas Cooper's physical space, many more changes will be made over the next several years.
"Faculty are most concerned with the quality of our collections and our services, and we've continued to make improvements in each; students care most about our space, and that's the next big area for us to address," McNally said.
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