College Library System

The Oberlin College library system currently holds over 2 million items.

The library system is busy doing some crazy voodoo improvement project called the Academic Commons.

1 Resources
2 Policies
3 Summer access
- 3.1 Contact info
4 Publications
5 In popular culture
6 Opinions
7 External links

Resources

Oberlin's library system has a bunch of reference librarians who often give presentations to classes before the professor assigns a research project. They are very helpful and easy to meet with.

There are many computers, scanners, printers and photocopiers scattered around throughout the various libraries.

Policies

The library system now allows drinks! As long as it's in a sturdy closeable container (like the Reading Girl mugs!), you can bring your coffee to any of the libraries to study with you. Read more about it at the food and drink policy page.

Summer access

The libraries are open over the summer.

For students who will not be on campus during the summer but still want to use the library system's resources, access to the databases is still possible. You used to have to register for access privileges, but now they're automatic. more info

Contact info

You can IM the library:

AIM: ObieRef
Yahoo!: ObieRef
MSN: ObieRef@hotmail.com

You can also IM the science librarian: alisonricker on AIM and Yahoo.

Publications

The library publishes a newsletter for Friends of the library titled Library Perspectives. Previous issues going back to 1994 are available online.

There's also some printing something-or-other...?

In popular culture

In Hocus Pocus, Kurt Vonnegut mentions Oberlin's library system:[1]

"If Henry Moellenkamp hadn't come out of his mother's womb dyslexic, and if that mother hadn't been a Tarkington and so known about the little college on Lake Mohiga, this library would never have been built and filled with 800,000 bound volumes. When I was a professor here, that was 70,000 more bound volumes than Swarthmore College had! Among small colleges, this library used to be second only to the 1 at Oberlin, which had 1,000,000 bound volumes."

(For the record, Oberlin has a little over 1.2 million books/periodicals. [2])