A new Web resource at University libraries provides students with an easier way to access books from other libraries and allows campus libraries throughout the Northwest to cooperate.
The resource, called Summit, offers students, staff and faculty access to more than 22 million items in Oregon and Washington university and college libraries.
John Helmer, executive director of the Orbis Cascade Alliance, said the service is more than just a new technological advance.
“The only reason this works is because these institutions banded together to form an organization,” Helmer said. “It’s the right thing to do to work together.”
The Orbis Cascade Alliance is a consortium with 27 member libraries throughout the Northwest. Summit combines the catalogues of these libraries over the Web for students to search for and borrow items that are unavailable at their campus libraries. The Summit catalogue provides access to twice as many items than the University offered with access only to the Orbis catalogue.
The books usually arrive within two or three days after students order them, Helmer said. Students can access the unique collections owned by each library, which account for more than half of the items available in the catalogue.
“They would be things that are sort of unique to their curriculum,” Helmer said. “The reality is there is just so much published each year that no one library can own everything.”
Graduate student Kathy Burk said she’s been an avid user of Summit since it became available during midsummer, ordering four or five books in the last two months.
“I’ve been using it a lot,” she said. “I’ve found that it’s been easier to find stuff just in the last month.”
With budget cuts and rising book prices, Summit gives libraries a way to beat low funding by sharing books, Helmer said. He added that although Summit has been available for some time now, the Web site will be substantially finished on Wednesday.
Along with the launch of Summit, University libraries are offering a new way to find full-text periodical articles online. Director of Library Systems Sara Brownmiller said that FindText provides a comprehensive way to find online text versions of articles instead of searching for the printed versions. The FindText Web site can be accessed through each library’s home page.
Brownmiller said the service can also be used with most of the library databases such as Academic Search Premier, a new version of Academic Search Elite, which has increased the electronic full-text availability by 30 to 40 percent.
“This is available to students anytime from anywhere,” she said.
When students are searching in the library databases for an article, the FindText icon allows students to see right away if the full text of the article is available online as opposed to having to visit a journal’s Web site to search for it, Brownmiller said.
Junior Natasha Terry, who said she’s had trouble in the past finding articles, tested the new service and said she found it user-friendly. She said she thinks it will be useful for future research.
“I’ve had times where I’ve found stuff and times where I’ve found a whole lot of nothing,” she said about past attempts to find articles without the FindText service.