Remember back when you had to report on your summer vacation activities? Well, the library doesn’t take a vacation during the summer; instead we were busily working to get things ready for when students returned. We wanted to give you a brief rundown on what we were up to while you were hopefully relaxing by the pool or getting great internship experience.
One big summer project is that we began to reclass the library collection from the Dewey Decimal classification system to the Library of Congress system. We are about half-way done with this project, and we hope to have it finished by next summer. We’re switching systems for a number of reasons, but mainly because we think browsing the collection by subject will be much easier. Finding a book may give you a little trouble since we’re using 2 systems, but just ask at the information desk if you have any problems.
If you’ve been in the Mario Buatta Materials Atelier this semester, you might have noticed that we also rearranged the materials collection. Now loose materials are towards the front of the room, and we pulled a lot of the outdated literature.
From July to the beginning of school, we’ve spent a huge chunk of time purchasing new books and databases. We’ve acquired over 200 new books, including 3 gift donations. H. Parkin Saunders generously donated books in honor of Mario Buatta, Sarah Weisberg donated a collection of art history books and exhibition catalogs, and the NYSID Class of 2011 gave the library almost 50 books on building types as their class gift. Another post is coming with more details on these generous gifts.
We’ve also increased the size of our e-book collection, and they’re now searchable in Bobcat, our online catalog. Textbooks for classes including Residential Design I and many MPS classes are now available in e-book form. To learn how to find and look at ebooks, visit our website’s ebooks page.
Finally, we’ve subscribed to two new databases, Art & Architecture Complete and CREDO Reference. Art & Architecture Complete is an article database that includes full-text articles, ebooks and citations. You can search it simultaneously with the Avery Index and Greenfile, two of our existing databases. CREDO Reference is a collection of 100 general reference ebooks on topics from healthcare to Shakespeare to tourism. If you need a regular or foreign language dictionary, a thesaurus or encyclopedia, CREDO is a great resource. CREDO also includes over a million images from the Bridgeman Art Library Archive.
As you can see, the library staff has been hard at work trying to improve your research and library experiences, so please let us know what you think. The Library wants to welcome back all the returning NYSID students and give a warm welcome to new students. Stop by the library for any of your research or information needs!
