The Library Visit
On October 10th, I was able to attend a special activity in the school’s library with fellow classmates. I was very excited about this library visit because I had never stepped foot in the library before despite walking by it numerous times to go to class. From prior information given in class about the activity, I was expecting a walking tour of the library with a librarian as a guide. Instead, we had more of a virtual tour of the library’s online resources, but my expectations were not completely wrong. The scavenger hunt in the second half of the activity was just like a tour with ourselves acting as the guide.
The first half of the activity took place in a computer lab and was very informative about the resources available to English Literature students. The librarian talked about a proxy one can download to access the library’s database from home. I already knew about it and had already installed it on my personal computer, but she gave us a useful trick with it. She showed us how to easily identify a university secondary source on Google Scholar with the simple activation of an icon in the browser. So, instead of searching through the library’s many databases, one can also look through a simple Google search. I thought this trick was very cool and neat for browsing the web at home.
As I mentioned earlier, I had never been to the library before, so literally everything was new to me. Despite having never been, I could imagine the different parts of it like study rooms and computer labs, but I was surprised to see such a big section reserved for films and tv shows. The scavenger hunt was a great way for me to discover the multitude of floors and their various parts, but also gave me the courage to go back on my own. I did not feel comfortable going in alone before because I did not want to look lost or sit somewhere I was not supposed to, but I can now walk into the library with confidence and find my way around without a problem.
Below are all the pictures taken during the scavenger hunt.
This is the place in the library where one gets help with research.
This is a group study room.
This is where one finds course reserves for books.
This is a copy of the MLA Handbook.
This is where one finds course reserves for films.
Everyone got their BCI cards during the scavenger hunt!
This is a copy of A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text.
This is a copy of the journal Texas Studies in Literature and Language from the year 2015.
This is the very nice librarian who lets eveyone check out laptops.
A group selfie taken after the scavenger hunt!