General Library Information

Libraries on campus include the Main College Library , located in the Kolenbrander-Harter Information Center, and the Sturgeon Music Library located in Cope Music Hall.

• The circulation period for most library materials is 30 days. Items not in demand may be renewed for an additional 30 days. Fines for overdue books are 25 cents per book per day. Borrowers not returning library materials will be charged $55.00 per item.

• OPAL and OhioLINK materials circulate for 21 days and may be renewed only once and only if there is not another hold on the item. Overdue fines for these items are 50 cents per book per day and $115.00 for each lost item.

• Reserve materials, items intended for use by a particular class, are available either for use in the library or for a circulation period selected by the professor. There is a $5.00 per item per reserve period fine for all overdue reserve materials.

• All periodicals (bound, unbound, and microforms) are intended solely for use in the library.

• Research materials (including books, articles, and other formats) not currently available in the library may be borrowed from another library through the interlibrary loan process. Request forms are available at the circulation desk and online. There is no fee for this service. Overdue fines on these items are charged at the rate of $1.00 per day per item. Users may also borrow directly from OPAL and OhioLINK libraries.

• A wide selection of reference databases and full-text journals are available through the library home page.

Library Hours

*The Main Library remains open until 2:00 a.m. Sunday through Thursday during finals week and the week before finals.
Library Resources Update

The Mount Union College Library has recently made numerous changes in its electronic resources including the addition of several new full-text products, the installation of new menus and features, and the reorganization of the research database pages.

In the fall term we introduced the family of EBSCO databases, whose flagship database, Academic Search Premier, offers the largest and broadest array of full-text articles available on our campus. Additional EBSCO databases include Business Source Premier, Newspaper Source, Health Source, Clinical Pharmacology, Computer Source, Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, Sociological Collection, and several school level databases.

Students looking for the general InfoTrac database will now find it listed as Expanded Academic ASAP. Newly available is InfoTrac OneFile which adds professional and popular journals and even more full-text to the coverage of Expanded Academic ASAP. Opposing Viewpoints, from the same publisher, provides full-text materials from a wide range of debate topic books. It is ideal for speech class assignments and freshman English course persuasive papers.

In January, Mount Union became a member of JSTOR, a cooperative project which provides access to electronic full-text articles in more than 300 major academic journals. Coverage begins with the first issue published, many in the 1800's, and includes all but the latest five years. Subject areas covered include history, literature, biology, botany, ecology, business, finance, and many others.

An electronic product of a general subject nature added this year is the World Book Encyclopedia, which should be very useful for education students. Other new database products available in particular subject areas include Ancient History and Culture and the ACM Digital Library.

We have attempted to make it easier to locate these products by revising our database menus. All general databases as well as encyclopedias and dictionaries are now listed only in the General Interest menu. This change has allowed us to shorten the subject menus so that individual titles are easier to locate. We have unbundled several sets of products so that individual titles, like the Encyclopedia Americana and the Nueva Enciclopedia Cumbre en Linea, can now be located separately.

A great feature recently added to many of our databases is called OLinks. These links connect you from the citation of an article in one database to the full-text of the article in another database. The intent is to make it as easy as possible to retrieve available full-text from other datadases and also from the Electronic Journal Center. You will find that remote access is now available for all EBSCO, InfoTrac, and OhioLINK databases. You may access these products from off campus by entering your name and barcode number when asked for a password or ID number.

A large number of electronic books have become available through our library catalog. NetLibrary titles may be accessed through links in the catalog record. A new service, Books 24X7, provides full-text titles in business and computer science. Books 24X7 can be accessed from its link on our Business and Law database page, but will soon have individual catalog records with direct links. There are also a growing number of full-text government documents being added to our book catalog with direct links from the catalog record to the full-text.

We hope that you enjoy these new services and features. If you need assistance with any of these products you may contact a reference librarian by stopping at the reference desk in the library or by calling x3795. You may also use the Ask A Librarian link on our library home page. This feature connects you to either our local library e-mail reference service or to the state-wide OhioLINK web reference service.