Photo Credit: Sara Bell
My previous post betrays it: at risk of being nerdy even for a Columbia student, I’m a big fan of the Butler Library sixth floor reading rooms, the Avery Library folio shelves, the stacks in the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary. I could (and do!) rapturize about the specifics, but if you’re reading a blog about undergraduate research, you’re probably on the same page. What you might not be fully clued into, particularly if you’re a new student, are the number of ways you can use the libraries to help your academic work in Core Curriculum classes. Using the libraries in your Core classes in particular can help set you up to make better use of them as you move through your undergraduate work.
Why think about the Core in particular with respect to libraries? On a pragmatic level, the Core is an opportunity to get your footing in academia: not only in avenues of thought, but also in methods of study. Your Core classes are designed to help you exercise skills like critical thinking and close reading, and you can use them in the same way to learn how to best utilize your resources at Columbia.
Of course, in part I mean checking out books: if you’re on campus, some items are available for pickup at the library. Even remotely, though, Columbia University Libraries also has a lot of other services related to the pandemic closures: their post lists their current services, including a scanning feature to have PDFs of book chapters sent to you virtually, but in particular you should check out their guide to virtual research, which gives you directions on how to access things like research guides or book an appointment with a subject specialist. Other virtual resources include ebooks, of course, in particular those available through the Hathitrust temporary access program, which will have “Log in for temporary access” as an option in their entries on Clio, the catalog website for Columbia libraries. Additionally, if you sign into Clio, you can access a number of databases using a proxy from Columbia.
Some tips for both new and returning students, when things return to a more normal state: the Offsite shared collection and the BorrowDirect and Interlibrary Loan services are helpful in both getting the Core books you need and figuring out how to get rarer books you want. Offsite is a shared collection between Columbia University Libraries and a few other academic libraries, which delivers books to the university for you in a couple of days. These books are part of the University’s own collection, and provide relatively quick access. Borrow Direct and Interlibrary Loan both allow you to borrow books from other institutions across the country. Both will take longer than Offside, but are useful for tracking down specific books that the libraries may not have, as well as for finding particular editions that are widely used at Columbia, and therefore harder to get, but are much more likely to sit on the shelf at Stanford or Johns Hopkins (Lattimore translations, I’m looking at you). Remember with Core books in particular to be careful about which edition you order: check your ISBNs!
Why think about libraries in relation to the Core in particular right now? It’s interesting and important, as you move through the Core, to consider why it is what it is. What makes a canon? The libraries have the books in the Core—and also almost twelve million more. Those Other books—though outside the canon we’ve decided to use—will be next to the canon on the shelf; they’ll come up second in your search results on Clio; they’ll look too interesting to pass up. They could form your next research paper in another class, or just a personal fascination. The physical space of the libraries invites this, even necessitates it: you cannot ignore that there are many branches you can take from your academic work in the Core. But since we won’t be looking at the shelves ourselves for a while, I invite you to prompt yourself to wander a little bit more than might seem immediately obvious as you attempt your virtual coursework. It isn’t the same as the sixth floor of Butler, but it feels a little closer.