Author Archives: Barbara Durniak

Primary Source Materials from CRL

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Center for Research Libraries

How would you go about finding/accessing primary source materials on laws about mental illness in 19th century Britain, education in India under colonial rule, or the life of Mary Kingsley, who, in the 1890s, explored Western Africa? Our library collection is pretty amazing and diverse, but so are the research interests of our faculty and students. Thanks to Vassar’s membership in the Center for Research Libraries, students working on these topics had easy access to newspapers, political documents, maps, and reports that the Vassar Libraries did not own. The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) collects and loans rare and expensive collections (in print, microfilm and online), thereby affording access to materials that otherwise would be unavailable to scholars at most college libraries. Sample collections cover US and foreign newspapers, NGO and government documents relating to human rights, Arabic manuscripts, and church records.

All materials available from CRL, irrespective of document type, may be borrowed via interlibrary loan. Please review the following information before making requests.

1.  To identify materials at CRL, search the CRL online catalog. Not everything in the CRL collection is cataloged. If you can’t find what you are looking for, contact a research librarian and we’ll find out whether or not the material is available.

2.   Requests can be made in two ways. CRL records are included in the ConnectNY catalog.   Order CRL materials you find in CNY the same way you request other ConnectNY books. If you’re ordering via ILLiad, use the book form and use the NOTES field to say you found this item at CRL. Most items in the CRL Catalog list an OCLC number at the top of the record; including this number in the OCLC # field will expedite your request.


3.  If you’re ordering multiple reels of microfilm via ILLiad, specify the date range in both the DATE and NOTES fields. You’ll need to check out and return all the reels at the same time. If you’re ordering multiple reels via ConnectNY, you must order each reel separately, and the reels need not be returned together.

4.  The loan period for CRL materials is 3 months.

5.  If you have any questions about finding materials in CRL, ask a research librarian. Contact the Interlibrary Loan department for questions about placed orders.

 

 

More Library Spookiness

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Another scary thing is how easy it is to lose stuff while you’re in the library. Human error . . . or poltergeists at work? Either way, if you’re missing something, ask the staff at the circulation desk to check the lost and found (be prepared to describe valuables). This week’s treasures include keys, glasses, umbrellas, textbooks and other tomes, clothing, jewelry, and even a laptop.

Spotlight: Barbara Durniak – Database Searching

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The Gargoyle Bulletin asked Research Librarian, Barbara Durniak, current Head of Access Services, to describe the most significant changes she has experienced at Vassar Library during her 28 years of service here.

Ancient library hieroglyphics? Actually, yes. In 1984, long before Google, the library hired me to launch a program introducing a new way to conduct academic research: DIALOG. DIALOG hosted commercial databases such as PsycInfo, ERIC, and Medline. Connection was via dial-up access using a telephone connected to a modem, searching was done via a specific command-driven syntax (see above – b11 was the command to start a search in PsycInfo), and charges were calculated by the time spent on the system and by the number of searches retrieved.

Because the service was costly to use, reference librarians mediated the searches. To minimize costs, librarians spent a lot of time preparing for each DIALOG session, meeting with students or faculty in order to understand their research needs and devising a search strategy that was as efficient as possible for while we were online. Still, it was nerve-racking to know the meter was running every second we were connected to the database. It was not uncommon to see charges of $30 or more per session.

New searching method: CD-ROM

By the late 1980s, commercial databases were migrating their data to another medium – CD-ROMs – that allowed end-users to do their own research with no clock ticking. Although this was a major advantage, only one person at a time could use the cd-rom workstation and every month updates had to be installed. And of course, the researcher had to be in the library to use the data.

We’re online … almost

Fast-forward to 1994, when another migration resulted in access to these resources through an online, text-based interface. This solved the problem of single-user access and clunky updating. However, the college’s internet capacity was woefully inadequate to handle the increased traffic and users experienced many busy signals and dropped calls. Fortunately, bandwidth issues were resolved just as databases migrated from text-based to web based interfaces.

The database landscape today

In 2004, the library enhanced online searching by adding a proxy server that enabled off-campus access to our proprietary databases and by implementing a program that linked citations from online databases to the fulltext of journals the library subscribed to electronically. As a result of these advances, doing library research is now an almost seamless process. Anywhere at anytime, you can search your topic and connect to online versions of articles.

Google and other search engines also started gaining traction around this time, however, even now, Google doesn’t provide the same search experience as the library’s proprietary databases. Check out our offerings on the library’s DATABASES page. The library subscribes to over 150 databases and if you need help navigating them, don’t hesitate to contact a research librarian.