E&H Library Praised for Advancing Student Research
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
Emory & Henry junior Brandon Aird has been working this semester on three large research papers. They deal with Jewish Americans, World War II and a literary analysis of a novel.
“I really enjoy the research process,” said Aird, an English history and Chinese major from the Virgin Islands.
In completing his research, Aird has relied heavily on the resources of the Frederick T. Kelly Library at Emory & Henry. With millions of documents, numerous on-line sources and membership in a large library consortium, the E&H library has been praised by students facing demanding research projects.
“The people at the library are very responsive, very helpful,” Aird said.
As a part of the Holston Associated Libraries Consortium, Emory & Henry shares resources with seven other libraries in the region, giving students access to more than 1 million printed volumes.
Full access to HAL Consortium resources is accomplished through inter-library loan, but many research options are available on campus. Approximately 278,750 print volumes, 61,000 microtext documents, 6,200 audiovisual items and 632 print journals make up the Kelly Library collection. In addition to these resources, students can access 93,254 electronic books and more than 13,000 journals through electronic databases.
According to Lorraine Abraham, director of library and information services, the collection at the library is dedicated to supporting academia. “The focus of the library collection is to support the academic curriculum and research needs of our students and our faculty,” Abraham said.
The library also contains many rare and valuable items, due to the library’s roles as a federal government documents depository since the 1880s and the home of the archives of both the College and the Holston Conference of the United Methodist Church.
In 1994, the College received a Title III grant for technology improvements on campus. This brought, among other things, the Internet to campus. The grant also brought electronic automation to the collection, as well as the first searchable electronic databases.
Lawrence Johnson, an E&H senior from Washington, D.C., relies heavily on the library databases, particularly a resource called “JSTOR,” which provides access to a wide range of journals and periodicals. “The on-line databases have proven very useful to me,” Johnson said.
According to librarian Jane Caldwell, electronic databases opened up a whole new world of research possibilities. “With the card catalog, you could search by a few parameters at a time,” said Caldwell. “Electronic databases allow multiple search parameters, as well as multiple keyword searches. Automation made information a lot more accessible.”
Automation has become so user-friendly that students no longer need to come to the library to utilize its resources. Even so, both Abraham and Caldwell say that students can get more from their research with the assistance of librarians, who are trained in advanced research methods.
No matter how technologically advanced libraries become, both Abraham and Caldwell agree that sometimes there are things that can’t be found by even the best online searches. “Even with all the online resources, there are still so many print resources that are new and only available in the library,” said Caldwell.
“There’s a lot to be said for shelf browsing,” Abraham said. By looking at books on the shelf, students may be able to find correlated materials a few books down that might not have ever shown up in an electronic search.
