Going from the size of a high school campus to the size of a college campus is a huge difference for someone like me. With a bigger campus, it comes with bigger classrooms, buildings and longer walks. One of my biggest challenges is navigating throughout the entirety of the campus. With the huge buildings to walk around, it can sometimes get very tiring when I can’t find my classes. Finding classrooms might not be that big of in issue, but it can be much more difficult if I need a specific item such as a book or to find a teacher if I have a question. Luckily at the Pattee and Paterno Library there are so many resources and my biggest worry is just finding the building itself, not necessarily the books inside of it.
In high school, or at least at my high school, the library system wasn’t very complicated. It was a room, a little bit smaller than the size of a lecture hall at Penn State, where there were about 8 to 9 different sections of books and that was it. We didn’t have a fancy computer system for finding a book or finding research on certain topics; we just found the book we wanted and checked it out. I would say around 75% of the people that attended my high school didn’t even use our library. The library can be a very useful tool, so it is important to be able to navigate throughout it. Pattee and Paterno Library isn’t that simple, so I’m going to need all the help I can get in order to be as proficient as possible.
Librarians, like Cheryl McCallips who is a librarian for the college of communication at the Patee and Paterno Library, subside the complication of the library and help to simplify the experience. When I toured the library it really helped me to know where everything is especially the printers, quiet places to film, and locations to study. The Pattee and Paterno Library also offers really cool online websites in which you can find books, online research documents, papers, and journals. The general website for the library here at Penn State can be found here, the website to assist you in research and projects can be found here.
The online system can be very confusing without guidance but luckily for me, Ms. Cheryl McCallips gave us a detailed tour on how to use the system. She taught us how to navigate through both of the websites from choosing your college within the library database system to narrowing down your search list on what information you actually need and want to see. We followed along on our own computers with her so we could do it and that helped to retain the information better, not just watch her do it. With these resources being presented to me and the ease of use, the papers I end up writing and researching can now be written to not only a higher degree, but it can also save me time in the process of finding certain information.
Ms. McCallister’s demonstration was easy to follow. She showed us examples from the college of communication to help us learn how to navigate through the website. My only complaint of the whole experience is that I wasn’t able to navigate through the website with my college, the college of engineering. However, the first-hand navigation of the website helped to understand in way better detail on how use the website, which will be easy to apply to my own college. The site that she showed us is like a google, but it narrows down the search results to further and more specific articles and documents. With Cheryl’s excellent guidance I can definitely see the use of the library’s websites in doing research and other projects. Its usefulness will be very beneficial. It will allow me to be able to find information and use that information in writing papers, which will help me perform to the best of my ability.
Contact me at…
Twitter: @CalebHershey1
Email: cjh6118@psu.edu