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Session 5: OU's Catalog & Other Academic Library Catalogs
Readings: Mann, Chapter 11, Locating Material in Other Libraries
Introduction This session is about locating and getting access to books (not journal articles, just books, or parts of books) that you might need to read books that are located in OU's library collection, or in other academic library collections from around the country. By getting access to a book, we can mean anything from having the book loaned to you physically (having OU Libraries mail it to you) to having staff members at the OU Libraries send you, via the Internet, a digital image of some specific set of pages from the book you are interested in looking through.
If you have checked in OU's catalog and found the item listed there, you know that OU Libraries owns the item. Were you a graduate student who either lives in the Norman area or is able to get to Norman by automobile, you might simply drive to campus, go into the library, and check the book out.
As an OU distance student, however, you will need to know the conditions and constraints under which OU Libraries can assist you to have some form of "access" to either the book itself, or to a part of the book (through the process of copying and sending you through the Internet a digital facsimile of a portion of the book) at a distance. In fact, under OU Libraries web site's left-side navigation buttons, in the Services category . . . Services > For Distance Education > About Distance Ed Services ... it gives this menu of information items, which you should make sure you read:
For How do I obtain books and articles from the OU library?, it gives you two ways of asking a a particular book. It says . . .
Now, I'm not going to take up the journal literature quite yet in this course, so we won't be following up on the procedures set by OU Libraries about journal articles; I am just talking about books in this session. What OU Libraries said above was that there is a web-based form, at the link they gave above for it, that will allow you to request the loan of a book, thesis, or dissertation.
I will have more to say about masters theses and doctoral dissertations later on in the course (there are some theses and dissertations that you, as an OU patron, can simply have downloaded copies of--pdf files--at no charge to yourself). For now, however, I am concerned with your ability to find catalog records that indicate those libraries that own copies of the book you are looking for.
Of course, the very first place you wish to check is your own library, the academic library through which you have authenticated access to its services because you are a student at its parent institution: OU Libraries. So, the first thing you will need to do, of course, is check OU's catalog to see if our library owns the book you are looking for: does it have it in its collection?
Using the OU catalog and the ILL system for Distance Students to find and get access to books (or parts of books) in OU's collection
If you don't feel particularly familiar with all the ins and outs of the use of the OU catalog, there are several short tutorials located of of the OU Libraries main menu at http://libraries.ou.edu/:
Help > Tutorials > Using the Library Catalog
Once you have at least scanned through those tutorials, and are confident and comfortable in using the OU catalog, you can determine whether the OU Libraries collection contains some particular book you are looking for. If it does own the item, you may may request that the staff at OU Libraries scan a portion of the book and make it available to you as a pdf file for downloading (to be read through your microcomputer's Adobe Acrobat viewer/reader plugin).
What if OU Libraries doesn't own the book?
What if, however, you searched through OU's online catalog and didn't find the book listed there? Well, you need to know how to do a couple of specific things to locate a book:
Step 1: OU catalog
You should first check OU Libraries first (the online catalog). That is step 1.
Step 2: Worldcat
If you determine that OU Libraries doesn't own a particular book you are interested in seeing, you should move to step 2, checking for the location of the book in other library collections. You do this by searching Worldcat, a database in the LORA system. It is a huge database of the catalog records from over 20,000 libraries, mostly in the United States.
Step 3: Get the book sent to you or have part of it scanned and sent to you by OU Libraries
Step 3 is just an indication that if you locate the book, either in OU's collection, or somewhere else around the US, you will need to determine both if, and how, OU Libraries might be able to either . . .
As I say, there are two ways in which OU Libraries will try to assist you in getting some level of access to the contents of the book. The first is the old, traditional means of actually requesting that the book (the actual physical book itself) be mailed from the loaning library to the requesting library (in this case, the OU Libraries system) for you to use. The second is a newer method of sending from the loaning library as a digital scan of some portion of the book (that portion's size, or number of pages, dictated by our national copyright laws). So if you determine that you, as an OU graduate student, need access to some book that OU Libraries does not own or have immediate access to, there is still hope that you might be able to get access to at least portions of it if not all of it.
Using
Worldcat: Worldcat is one of the resources that OU Libraries serves up under what it calls its LORA system (Library Online Resource Access system), so you will need to click on the LORA button from one of the OU Libraries web pages:
From there, you have choices in the way in which you indicate that you want to be attached to the Worldcat database.
You may either type in the name worldcat in the Search for Resource Title area, or you may click Databases in the Browse By Alphabetical Listing area (and then click on the W link to get the list of databases that begin with the letter w. The third option on this page, Search by Subject, is not going to be particularly helpful to you in locating Worldcat (although it will be helpful to you later on, as you try to discover what LORA resources are available to you for some particular disciplinary or professional-practice subject area). Once you have found and logged into Worldcat, you will search for a book (using the usual range of search alternatives by authors name, or title, or by keywords, etc.) and get some sort of result displayed. That display, although the items will be different, will look something like this:
The first book, Attitude organization and change, is located in the OU Libraries collection--if you look on the line of the record's content below Document, you will see UNIV of OKLAHOMA. The next item, Milliennium, messiahs, and haymen is not in the OU collection according to this record, but clicking on the Libraries Worldwide link will begin to show you (and, more importantly, show the OU Libraries staff members who would be attempting to borrow it for you) where the book is located among the libraries that OU tends to try to borrow from (other libraries in the state, other libraries in the Big 12, etc.) It is important for you to note simply that the book you are looking for does indeed exist (if you found it in Worldcat, you have verified its existence), and that Worldcat records the fact that a number of other libraries in the US own the book (note the number following the Libraries Worldwide label). What you can do now is move on the OU Libraries' web form that allows you to tell the library's Document Delivery/Interlibrary Loan staff members that you wish to get, or see the contents of, the book, if that is possible. Getting Access, from a Distance, to the Content of a Book There are several methods that may be used to allow you to peruse the content of the book you are interested in. Those methods depend on the restrictions placed on the loaning institution's policies as well as OU Libraries' (the borrowing library) policies. However, if you have determined that OU does not own the book, and you have found the book listed in Worldcat, you could (but we don't recommend it) fill out the internal form made available through FirstSearch databases (Worldcat is a FirstSearch database), which sends your filled-out ILL request form to the OU Libraries Document Delivery staff. They will accept and process the forms for requests to have journal articles made available to you, but they won't try to borrow a book from another library and turn around and re-mail it on to you. They aren't allowed to do that by the Interlibrary Loan code of regulations: the Interlibrary Loan rules are set up to make the borrowing library responsible to the loaning library for the books safe use and return, so OU Libraries can't afford to allow anything untoward to happen to the resource it is assuming legal responsibility for. Instead of filling out the FirstSearch ILL form found in Worldcat, what you could do (and what we recommend you do) is fill out the OU Libraries own Interlibrary Loan - Book Request Form that was mentioned above as being available to you. Its link is found on this menu to Request a book, thesis or disseratation . . . but, of course, you can also get to it through the library's left-side navigation bar, following these labels down to the form:
For you (Advanced Programs students who are, more than likely, located somewhere off-campus, and for that matter, outside of Oklahoma or outside of the continental United States), this form should be the method you use to request books you would like to have access to that are located either in OU's Norman collection (something you found in Webcat) or in any other library collection(s) that you have verified through Worldcat.
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