Services For Faculty

Brooks Library partners with faculty at Central Washington University to help students succeed during their academic careers and to prepare them for life beyond the walls of our classrooms.   Our teaching faculty serve as a bridge between our students and library services in a time of vast and accelerating change in academic instruction and information technology.  The Library also strives to support our faculty in their research endeavors.  Here are some starting points to help you with both instruction and research.

• Locating Books
• Locating Periodicals
• Interlibrary Loans
• Circulation Of Library Materials
• Selection Of Library Materials
• Placing Materials On Reserve
• Instruction
• Research
• Contact Us

Locating Books

Library Online Catalog (Cattrax)

Explore the library online catalog, Cattrax and search for more than 500,000 books, 400,000 government documents, 90,000 maps, 5,000 dvd’s and videos and more in the library’s physical collections.  Consult the Circulation Department pages for more information on loan periods for various types of materials, for online reserves, and more.

Summit

The Summit Catalog consists of over 25 million items owned by the 35 member libraries of the Orbis Cascade Alliance, a consortium of Washington and Oregon public and private universities.  If you don’t find the materials you need at the CWU Library, search the Summit Catalog.

WorldCat

For books you may want to search the WorldCat database first to confirm publication dates, information about editions, etc.

If you need help with or further information about our Interlibrary Loan services consult the ILL FAQ.

Locating Periodicals

Print Materials

Search by periodical title in the Online Catalog.  If we have the title in our print collections you will see the Library of Congress call number for the item.  Current and recent items are shelved on the Second Floor in the Current Periodicals Room immediately to the right as you come up the stairs.  Older bound volumes are housed to your left on the Second Floor.

Online Materials

Try one of the following methods to obtain the online text of articles:

1. Search the online catalog for your periodical title.  If we offer online access to the title you will see one or more links to the full text when you are viewing the individual item record for the periodical title in our online catalog.
2. Search or browse our e-journals portal.  You may search by specific titles or browse by a variety of subject categories.
3. Choose the appropriate  database for your subject interest(s).  Your query may return the full text of articles from the database you are currently searching, or the resulting list of citations may provide you with links to locate the text in one of our other databases.

Interlibrary Loans

If you cannot locate books or other materials that you need, you may use our Interlibrary Loan Service (ILL) to request items.  ILL services for faculty include:

• Borrow returnable materials not held by CWU or Summit
• Obtain copies of articles not owned by CWU
• Deliver electronic copies from CWU library periodicals collection
• Provide returnable items from the CWU collections (includes Black Hall teaching collection) to University Center faculty
• Rush service available for $10.00 per returnable

If you need help with or further information about our Interlibrary Loan services consult the ILL FAQ.

Circulation Of Library Materials

Faculty may check out books from our collection for 90 days.  Music compact discs circulate for 90 days, and Media Circulation materials such as DVDs and videotapes check out for 7 days.  Please bring your campus ID card along when checking out materials.  For more information on circulation services including Summit, consult the Circulation Department Services page.

Login to our online catalog to view your account, to renew materials online, to see when materials are due, to see when Summit materials will be arriving, and more.

Selection Of Library Materials

Faculty may order library materials from department allocations administered by the Library.   Book, video, and music CD orders may be submitted online. You may also submit orders by campus mail to the Library Faculty member who serves as your departmental liaison, or by sending them to Collection Development Librarian Pat Owens (Phone: x1306; Mail Stop 7548).  

If you have any questions about purchases for our collections please see our Collection Development Policy.

Liaisons are librarians with assigned subject collection development responsibilities who select books and materials to build the library's collections, as well as evaluate and plan for its future development. They also conduct library instruction and act as liaison to the faculty in their areas of subject responsibility. Librarians are generally assigned areas that match their academic backgrounds and interests and are available for in-depth library research assistance.   Find your Library liaison here.

If you need reviews you can search for or browse the following online sources:

• ChoiceReviews.online
• Book Index With Reviews

You may also view the most recent month’s additions to the library’s collections on our New Library Materials page.  This list is automatically generated on the first day of the month and consists of all items cataloged and added to the online catalog in the previous month.

Placing Materials On Reserve

During the 2008/09 academic year Docutek, our electronic reserves system, received over 16,000 hits.  During that same period only 280 hardcopy articles were  
checked out from the Library Circulation Desk.  Processing hundreds of copies uses up a tremendous amount of time and supplies.

Beginning in the Fall Quarter of 2009, the Circulation Department will no longer put print copies of articles on reserve. They will all be scanned into our Docutek online reserves system where your students may retrieve them online and either view them electronically or print them out.  This will save faculty time and effort, as there will longer be a need to make multiple copies available.

The Library Circulation Department will continue to put books on reserve as has been our past practice for monographs.

Instruction

Library instruction can be arranged in a number of ways depending on your class needs.   If you wish, your Library Liaison can arrange customized instruction sessions designed to introduce your classes to library research.  Instruction normally contains an online component and can be tailored to specific class assignments.  The Library Classroom, Room 154, is available for our librarians to provide you with instruction but please be aware that this room also serves as a student computer lab and is heavily booked at times, especially at the beginning of each quarter.

For general information on instruction contact the Reference Desk at x1021.

You may also contact any of the following Reference Librarians to discuss options for your classes and to schedule an instruction session:

Research

Topical Information

Should you need a starting point for research, or if you just want to browse available resources in a specific discipline, try using our online Subject guides.  The guides feature links to a wide variety of resources, all of which have been reviewed by library faculty:  online and print reference materials, databases and electronic periodicals, web sites, and much more.  Use these guides to augment your research and suggest them to your students.  The Library updated these guides during the Winter Quarter of 2009 so there should be materials available for most disciplines.

We also have a new online service (beginning in the Fall of 2009), a guide to Databases By Subject that can help you and your students locate critical materials more quickly. Librarians have reviewed all of the databases from our online collections and assigned those that are most relevant to each campus discipline.

Managing Citations

As of January 2009, Brooks Library no longer maintains a subscription to Refworks. The library instead recommends Zotero[zoh-TAIR-oh] "...a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.”

See the Zotero web site for more information. With Zotero, you can:

• Create a Zotero library stored on your personal laptop or in your USB drive (flashdrive / jumpdrive)
• Collect citations off of a database, a catalog, a webpage and from scratch
• Save a snapshot of a webpage and create notations and highlight information directly on the page
• Manage your library by creating folders, subfolders and keyword “tags” for searching your sources
• Import your citations into Microsoft Office Word as you write
• Export your references from Refworks into Zotero