Some of our most common reference questions are simple inquiries into our holdings.
The easiest way to find out whether we have an item you're looking for is to search in our catalog. It already includes the most frequently used materials in our collections, and more records are added every day. Over the past year, Rachel has been hard at work adding our local (individual) church history materials, as well as new acquisitions, and materials we received from Chicago Theological Seminary. More and more of our pamphlets and images are being made available online through our digitization projects. The archival staff also adds and revises guides to our record collections on a regular basis.
If your searching doesn't turn up the results you'd hoped for, but it seems like something we're likely to own, you can always contact the librarian or reference librarian by phone or email for assistance. As mentioned above, there are a few sections that haven't made it into the online catalog yet, and we're happy to double check in the old-fashioned card catalog in those instances.
When you do find something you'd like to read, come on in and request it at the front desk. If you're too far to visit, check if the catalog record either has a link to a digital copy or is categorized as "circulating". We lend books published in the past 35 years, in person or by media mail. Our policies for borrowing, renewal, and late fees are detailed on our website.
Non-circulating materials -- including older books, all microfilm, and un-digitized archival collections -- need to be used within the library or requested as reproductions within U.S. copyright standards.
What if you don't have it, or I can't come in to the library to use it?
If the material you need isn't in our collections in a convenient format, you still have a lot of options:
- For materials we own, ask if it can be copied or scanned. We do offer scan-on-demand services within reason.
- Our Useful Links page includes a number of religious, state, collegiate, cooperative, and independent repositories.
- The Internet Archive contains a large (and growing) number of out-of-copyright digitized materials, including some of our own.
- You may be able to find a copy of a published work closer to your location in WorldCat.org, the worldwide catalog created by OCLC. It's not comprehensive, but it certainly comes close.
- Digitized books and journal articles can often be found in Google Books and Google Scholar, respectively.
In the end, our goal is to help you find the information you need, whether it's in our collections or somewhere else. While we hope these tips will be useful in your research, you are always welcome to contact us for further assistance.
--Robin
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