Students, faculty will love lists feature in new catalog

Summar Library has added 109 new books, including everything from literature and poetry to programming, molecular biology, psychology, economics, politics and more.

These are just a few of the new titles available:

• Collage of myself: Walt Whitman and the making of Leaves of grass, by Matt Miller
• The game of cops and robbers on graphs, by Anthony Bonato and Richard J Nowakowski
• First life: Discovering the connections between stars, cells and how life began, by D.W. Deamer
• Internet addiction: a handbook and guide to evaluation and treatment, by Kimberly S. Young and Cristiano Nabuco de Abreu
• Taking Sudoku seriously: The math behind the world's most popular pencil puzzle, by Jason Rosenhouse and Laura Taalman
• Maynard's revenge: the collapse of freemarket macroeconomics, by Lance Taylor

Access the entire list using a feature available through our new catalog.

While Summar Library's new catalog is still under development, students and faculty can begin to take advantage of its features.
One particularly helpful feature involves the ability to create lists.
Why would anyone want to make a list using a library's catalog? Here are a few reasons the lists feature is so helpful:

• It enables faculty to create lists of books they recommend for coursework.
• It enables students to create lists of books they find in the catalog that they might want to check out of the library when writing a paper or working on a project.
• It enables students to explore lists created by other users on topics of interest.
• It enables students to find citations for use in bibliographies, with the ability to specify style, such as Turabian, APA (6th ed.), and MLA.
  

Let's say you are a faculty member who often includes a list of recommended reading on syllabi for the courses you teach. Creating a list in WorldCat Local makes it easy for students to find those books, complete with an image of the book cover and access to the book's call number.

You also can include other types of materials in your list of recommended items, such as articles (accessible through the library's extensive list of databases), eBooks (accessible through Ebrary or an EBSCO database), eVideo (accessible through Films On Demand) music (accessible through Naxos Music Library), films the library owns on VHS or DVD, and audio books available in the library.

Let's say you are a student who is writing a paper on a topic related to medieval times. A simple search of lists using the term "medieval" yields 135 lists created by other WorldCat users who have stored information here on sources related to the Middle Ages.

Students can choose to watch these lists for new additions.

Students also can create lists of their own. Let's say you are a student who is writing a paper on Ernest Hemingway. Once you have found materials on Hemingway that you are interested in using, you can easily create a list of these materials that you can access anytime you sign on to your WorldCat account.

This way, you can quickly access your saved list -- including the items' call numbers -- when you are ready to look for the materials for check-out or use them in the library.

Getting started:

• First, create a WorldCat account.
• Second, update your profile.
• Now you can begin to either search for lists (using the drop-down menu under "Search" in the menu on Union's WorldCat web page) or create lists of your own once you begin to search for material in Summar Library's new catalog.
  

If you have questions, don't hesitate to approach our staff. We are eager to help you navigate all the new and helpful features available to you by using our new catalog.