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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 27, 1984)
984 Monday, August 27, 1984/The Battalion/Page 3C A&M library offers much more than books last year, e provided, 1 is low ai i, murders k reported initi roperty theft i of careleM* id age this® rent from a iber 1983 to worth of pm as A&M, Rip for stolen pto nt. ice t late repo® recovery t rting is tol .ailable tospt nd student! ,ecurity and •aks to all into mien in the ■ailable tospt f campus, ■nt, which ft jolice offra I officers, to conduct oil :1 serve acre! iatrol ofiicets nd arrange d cars. nt recenih bicycle trail: average 2 e the tt said the s made bp stop signs m estrians.' .same tr itor vehicles By Karl Spence Reporter The Sterling C. Evans Library, the main library at Texas A&M Univer sity, houses 1.5 million volumes on six floors, providing the University and community with a large facility for study and research. To take full advantage of the library, users should become familiar with its lay out and services. Library cards are issued free to the students, faculty and staff of Texas A&M, to former students, to high school students in the Texas A&M honors program, and to fac ulty from Prairie View A&M, Texas A&M at Galveston and Tarleton State University. Cards are issued at the circulation desk for a small fee to anyone else. i vement: cstatirant 1 Across from the circulation desk is the card catalog, which is being sup plemented this year by a computer system, the ALIS II on-line public catalog. Circulation division head Colleen Cook says the system will have terminals on every floor, some for staff use and some for the pub lic’s, more than 40 in all. She says us ers will be able to find items by au thor, by title, by author and title, by call number and, when the item is part of a published series, by series. Eventually, ALIS II will replace the files of index cards, but, as Cook points out, “‘eventually’ is undefi- nable.” Five to 10 years or more could pass before patrons are accus tomed to its use and have come to rely on it exclusively. There is no date for removing the cards, she says, so those who are fond of them need take no alarm. In the meantime, Aggies who learn the new system no longer will have to make repeated treks back to the cards to look up sources when they are already among the stacks on the upper floors. Just use the nearest terminal. Next to the card files is the refer ence desk, whose staff will help users with the computer and with any questions they may have about the li brary. T he reference department also includes various encyclopedias, indexes, bibliographies, directories and almanacs, along with study ta bles for their use. Down the first-floor hall is the li brary copy center, and at the end of the hall is the current periodicals de partment. It contains magazines, journals and more than 100 newspa pers from around the world. Security is tight at current peri odicals. A library or student identifi cation card is required to read the more popular magazines there. Us ers’ briefcases and purses must be opened for inspection on leaving, because C.P.D. materials do not leave the room. To the right of the C.P.D. is the Reserve Department, where quiz files and faculty-assigned readings are held. Most reserve materials also do not leave the room. As at current periodicals, tables and photocopiers are provided for in-room use. On the second floor are the ad ministrative offices, conference rooms, map department, special col lections, interlibrary services, micro text department, technical report department, documents division and, at the rear, a vending-machine snack bar and lounge. “We have a lot of things up here that people don’t even know about,” says Pat Lahrof the map depart ment. She says students often come into the map room and declare they are just now discovering it after us ing the library for years. The depart ment holds a large collection of maps, globes, atlases, charts and ae rial photographs. Most of the maps, including street and highway maps, topographic maps, soil surveys and geologic charts, may be checked out for two weeks. Across from the map department, the special collections division holds privately-donated collections on sub jects ranging from science fiction to world bird life to the Ku Klux Klan. All materials are in closed stacks and may be inspected in the special col lections reading room. The interlibrary services division borrows materials not found at Texas A&M from other libraries. It serves mostly faculty, staff and grad uate students. The microtext department keeps microfilm and microfiche copies of newspaper back issues, college cata logs, agricultural experiment station publications, and various other tech nical, corporate, governmental and educational documents. Photocopies of those materials can be made. The technical report department and the documents division contain governmental, corporate and techni cal papers, including publication in dexes, statistical abstracts, U.S. stat utes and regulations, and the reports of agencies such as the FBI, the En vironmental Protection Agency, and NASA. Above the second floor are the stacks, arranged under the Library of Congress classification system. The sixth floor holds sections A to D: general reference works, philoso phy, psychology, religion, and Euro pean and world history. The fifth floor holds sections E to K: western hemisphere history, ge ography, anthropology, social and political science, and law. The fourth floor holds sections L to Qh: education, music, fine arts, architecture, languages and litera ture. The third floor holds sections Qk to Z: science, medicine, agriculture, technology, engineering, and mili tary and naval science. To the rear of the building, above the hall leading to the snack bar and lounge, are four levels of stacks holding books that were never re classified when the library converted from the Dewey Decimal to the Li brary of Congress system. Behind the Dewey stacks, above the snack bar and lounge, is a small reading room containing the Tem pleton collection of conservative books and pamphlets dealing with economics, politics and law. Stan Hodge, head of the resource development division, is in charge of building on these collections. His priorities for acquisitions are, first, to support the University curriculum; second, to assist faculty research; and third, to provide leisure read ing. He welcomes student sugges tions for new books, promising to consider every request and approve the majority. Hodge has two requests of library users: please carry on conversations in the lounges and group study rooms rather than in the reading rooms and on the main floors, and please refrain from stealing or de facing library materials. The great est number of user complaints Hodge receives concern noise in study areas, and he says the library spends thousands of dollars replac ing or repairing lost or damaged items. The library devotes $3 million of its $5-million budget to buying materials, Hodge says. As anyone who has purchased a college text book knows, they are very expen sive. Hodge estimates that the library, which was expanded in 1968 and 1979, will be filled to its 2-million- volume capacity by 1990. The tenta tive plan for that event, he says, is to begin moving some materials out of the building. Little-used items may be moved to a remote storage area, to be retrieved individually on re quest. Special department offers microcomputers By MICHAEL RAULERSON Reporter Students can do anything from writing a term paper to viewing vi deo tapes for class studies in the Learning Resources Department of the Sterling C. Evans Library. The LRD offers the newest micro computer models, as well as the lat est developments in audio-visual technology at no cost to faculty, staff and students of Texas A&M Univer sity. The department also offers services to the blind or partially sighted. The LRD opened its doors for mi crocomputer users in September 1982 with 25 Apple computers, said Hal Hall, head of the special formats division of the LRD. Hall said it be came obvious that 25 computers were not enough and that the stu dents wanted something other than Apple computers to work with. Since that time the computer fa cilities have expanded to include 34 Apple 11+ and Apple lie comput ers; 41 Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III and TRS-80 Model 4 computers; 20 Texas Instruments Professional Computers; five IBM PCs (personal computers); two Balcones Z-80 Mi crocomputers, and 20 Plato comput ers, Hall said. Most all the computers have dot matrix printers, but the de partment also has a limited number of letter quality printers. Hall said during the summer a near-letter quality printer, an Epson LQ-1500, was donated to the depart ment by Cargill Computer Products, a retail outlet in Houston. He said Texas Instruments also has donated two near-letter quality printers dur ing the last year. As a result of these donations, the department now has seven near-letter quality printers, he said. Hall said computing facilities probably will be expanded during the fall semester. “We anticipate the addition of over 40 computer stations in the late fall,” Hall said. Hall said the department has pur chased more than 200 software pro grams for class studies on request of The LRD offers a selec tion of audio-visual serv ices that include audio and video tapes, filmstrips and other related materi als, Hall said. The depart ment also recently ac quired an optical laser video disk player, he said. faculty members. He said the pro grams are available for students, but are checked out on a “room use on ly” basis. Computer use has increased dra matically in the LRD in the last year, Hall said. He said 60,881 hours were logged between Sept. 1, 1982, and Aug. 31, 1983, and he estimated that 112,000 hours would be logged by Aug. 31, this year. He said April is the busiest month with about 17,000 hours logged. “If you’re doing a paper in the LRD and it’s due in April, you better plan ahead,” Hall said. Hall said a reservation policy helps to control the use of the com puters, although computers can be used any time if space is available. He said a computer can be reserved over the phone up to one week in advance for two hours, but only one reservation per day is allowed. The LRD offers a selection of au dio-visual services that include audio and video tapes, filmstrips and other related materials, Hall said. The de partment also recently acquired an optical laser video disk player, he said. Services available to the blind or partially sighted include a Kurzweil Reading Machine which synthesizes speech for the words the machine reads through an optical scanner. The machine can read books, 8 1/2 by 11 inch pieces of paper and most other texts, but has trouble reading newspapers because it can’t deter mine where the column ends, Hall said. The department also has a Brailler, a machine that creates texts in Braille, and an Apollo Laser Mag nification System. The system uti lizes a television camera and tele vision monitor to magnify texts for easier reading. Theft in an area with numerous computers and audio-visual ma chines could be a problem, hut Hall said the department has suffered only a couple thefts. He said new se curity measures should minimize f u ture thefts. The LRD began with a limited col lection and no audio-visual or micro computer facilities about four years ago in a small L-shaped room on the second floor of the library, Hall said. The department later moved into its present quarters on the sixth floor of the library, but Hall again is worried about space. “This room is almost too small,” he said. “If the computers come in in the fall and computer use continues to increase, then we will need more ’.ations: el: MIA.. 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