Friday, April 25, 2008

Powerful Tools for Literary Criticism, Interpretation and Biography: The Literature Resource Center online


Through its subscription to The Literature Resource Center, LBCC Library is proud to offer students and faculty the world’s most current, comprehensive and reliable online literature database. The Literature Resource Center offers the campus community the broadest and most representative range of authors and critical views and providing more substantive biographies and full-text literature criticism than any other resource

The Literature Resource Center provides:

* Biographical entries on more than 130,000 authors — from antiquity to the present – from Gale literature sources, providing detailed biographical, bibliographical and contextual information about authors’ lives and works

* More than 70,000 selected full-text critical essays and reviews by a wide range of critics

* More than 650,000 articles from more than 300 scholarly journals and literary magazines

* More than 7,000 overviews of frequently studied works taken from Gale literature sources

* Nearly 3,000 author portraits

* Active links to nearly 5,000 selected Web sites

* Merriam-Webster’s® Encyclopedia of Literature, featuring 10,000 definitions of literary terms

Test drive The Literature Resource Center at the LBCC Library web site : click on the “articles and databases” tab on the left side of the screen, then select Literature Resource Center from the list of databases.


For more information contact: Nenita Buenaventura, Access Services Librarian at nbuenaventura@lbcc.edu

Library Update #53

Saturday, April 12, 2008

LBCC Faculty and Staff, Borrow Books and Media at CSULB Library!


Live near CSULB? Need a book, CD, or DVD you can’t locate at LBCC or your local public library? Don’t have the time to get the book you need through Interlibrary Loan? You should know that for the past several years LBCC Library and CSULB have had a partnership agreement in effect. What does this mean for you and your students?


* You can use and borrow books and media from CSULB Library (a collection of over 1.4 million items) as though you were a student, faculty, or staff at that campus

* Loan periods are:
o Books, 120 days for faculty and staff, 3 weeks for students
o Media (CD’s, DVD’s, Videos) , 7 days for faculty, staff, and students

* Not included are items on reserve and periodicals; library computers and databases are restricted to one hour use per 24 hour period and require separate registration

* It is the borrower’s responsibility to return books and media to CSULB — there’s no courier service between campuses



For more information contact: Nenita Buenaventura, Access Services Librarian at nbuenaventura@lbcc.edu.

Library Update #52

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Chat With a Librarian 24/7: How Can They Do That?


Working late on a term paper? Need to verify something from your class notes? An image or graph to add some visual interest to your report? Now LBCC students can connect with a librarian any time, day or night to find help with these and other questions. Just go to the library web site, click on “Ask a Librarian” on the right side of the screen, scroll down to “Virtual Chat” and click. (But before you do, notice the four other ways you can reach a librarian for the help you need.)

As devoted as they are to supporting students and faculty with their research needs, LBCC librarians haven’t established a call center, and they aren’t taking questions at home in their pajamas to maintain this 24/7 reference service. A nationwide consortium of librarians from different time zones, including librarians at LBCC and CSULB, takes the calls and provides the advice and assistance. Though the librarian may be thousands of miles away, he or she can connect to the LBCC’s library home page and use our online catalog and databases to retrieve the information that’s requested. This is another example of how today’s libraries and librarians have taken the initiative to become interconnected and interdependent to serve students better.


For more information contact: Eleanor Sonido at esonido@lbcc.edu.

Library Update #51