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Parents and Family Members' Guide to the SU Libraries: What We Have

This guide is intended to help parents and other family members of SU students get to know what the Libraries have to offer their students.

Collections

We have numerous collections to support our students' information needs, including:

1. Course Reserves:

Professors sometimes put books, articles, or other items on "reserve" for students to use for their courses. We also have some textbooks on reserve, but that number is declining as more faculty assign electronic textbooks. Students can search for Course Reserves at the Course Reserves webpage, and reserve items can be requested at the Library Service Desk on the first floor of the GAC.

2. Books:

  • Print: We have more than 200,000 print books, including some leisure reading. Search for them using the "Start your search here" box on the Libraries home page. The physical books can be located by collection and call number. Most books are found in the third-floor stacks of the GAC, while most (but not all) juvenile literature will be found at the CRC. There is an interactive map of the GAC "stacks" or bookshelves available by clicking here. If your student needs a book we don't own, they can borrow it using Direct Borrowing, if it is held within USMAI, or through Interlibrary Loan; see "The Basics" tab for more details.
  • Electronic: We also have access to many thousands of e-books. These can be searched using the "Start your search here" box on the Libraries home page.

3. Journals/Magazines/Periodicals:

We subscribe separately to a few hundred journals, some in print and some in electronic form. We have access to tens of thousands more through databases (see the next item in this list).

  • Print: Current print journals are found on the shelves surrounding the Pit on the first floor of the GAC.  Older print issues typically have been bound into volumes and are available in GAC 370, the third-floor reading room on the north side of the GAC. Some of these journals are available full-text online through databases, but in most cases, there are at least abstracts of their articles in our online databases.
  • Electronic:  A good starting point for searching for articles in e-journals is the "Start your search here" box on the Libraries home page. In addition, there is a tab on the "Start our search here" box on the Libraries home page for E-Journals. This leads to a searchable list of journal titles that tells you where to find the title in our electronic collections and the years available.

4. Databases:

These range from databases heavily oriented to journal articles, whether full-text or abstracted, to streaming videos to digitized newspapers and books to digitized primary sources to datasets. The "Start your search here" box on the Libraries home page searches only a couple of general databases. To search other databases, click on the "Advanced Search for Additional Databases and Search Options" link, which is below "Start your search here," and follow the directions. We also have an A-to-Z database list  that lists all of our databases in alphabetical order.

5. Manuscripts, archives, old photographs, maps, and other original materials:

The Nabb Center on the fourth floor of the GAC has original materials relating to Salisbury University and Delmarva as well as the United States and world history. These items may be labeled Nabb Center, University Archives, or Special Collections.  See the Nabb Collections page for details.

6. DVDs and CDs:

We have a variety of DVDs and CDs, including foreign-language films and a large music collection. These items can be found by using the "Start your search here" box. The boxes for them can be found in the Pit on the first floor of the GAC or in the south reading room on the third floor of the GAC; take the box to the Library Service Desk on the first floor to get the actual disc.

7. Government Documents:

The SU Libraries are a federal depository library as well as being a Maryland state depository library. That means we collect selected federal and state documents. Print copies are found in the third-floor south reading room, but we now mostly get electronic versions. The electronic versions can be found using the "Start your search here" box on the Libraries home page.