by Susan Magee
Daily Lobo Columnist
In the 2001-02 school year, the General Library (Centennial, Center for Southwest Research, Fine Arts, Parish and Zimmerman) had almost 1.5 million visitors. Were you one of them? We've made some changes over the summer we hope you'll find beneficial.
New signs will help you better find your way around the libraries and we're working to clean up problems with misplaced materials. There is a new coffee cart with snacks in Zimmerman, the 'cafÇ' and vending machine area in CSEL has been expanded, and all the branches have a new policy that allows you to consume food and covered non-alcoholic beverages in designated areas.
More noticeable, however, are the 180 public PC workstations deployed throughout the five branches of the library. Each of these workstations gives you access to the Internet, including most of the databases to which the library subscribes. There are still a few databases accessible only on specifically-designated PCs.
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To make it easier to use the information you've found, most workstations also have the Microsoft Office Suite and the UNM Mirada Package software. All public PCs are new or only one year old, except for the PCs that are replacing terminals.
The Student Fee Review Board's 2001-02 allocation to the General Library funded network upgrades that provide faster Internet connections and the installation of I-Port connections for user-laptops. Signs and maps showing the I-port locations are being installed now. This year's allocation contributed toward the approximately $650,000 the General Library will spend on electronic resources, including databases, full-text journals, abstracts and indexes. The equipment and software costs were covered by money donated to the library for technology purposes.
This past summer, we also redesigned the General Library's Web site (http://elibrary.unm.edu).
The new interface will, we hope, make it easier to find books or journals, determine what resource to use for your subject area, contact a librarian with a question and find general information about library services and hours.
From your home or office computer you can renew a book (through http://LIBROS.unm.edu) or, with an UNM Net ID, access more than 150 databases and almost 13,000 of the more than 16,000 periodical titles to which the General Library subscribes. If you have a reference to some article or book we don't have, you can request the item through interlibrary loan (http://ILLiad.unm.edu/illiad/logon.html). Check with a librarian first, though. Perhaps we can find something from our collections that will fit your needs.
In addition to these changes, physical and virtual, we added a new service - electronic reserves (http://ereserves.unm.edu). This means that for students whose professors choose this option, there is no wait for classmates to return materials or having to visit the library reserve desk. This semester, the faculty for more than 120 classes have taken advantage of this service to allow their students access to their reserve readings, homework assignments, and exams 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Not all reserve materials can be put on electronic reserve due to copyright or format restrictions, but the feedback we're receiving is overwhelmingly positive.
Many of these changes are a direct result of feedback we've received from the UNM community through surveys and other suggestions. Thank you for helping us learn how to serve you better.
We hope you'll continue to let us know what we're doing right and what we can do better.
Susan Magee is chairwoman of the Library's Outreach and Communications Committee.
