The library is happy to work with instructors to provide materials for their students at the prison. Our goal is to make this as simple for you to manage as possible. But remember that the library has a very small, very busy staff and so all library research assignments for your students must be planned for and coordinated with the librarian in advance, either in person or by phone (x8739 -- voicemail x8735).
For classes that need current article research on topics (sociology, etc.):
For each class: In general, it won't be practical to respond to individual student requests. Instead the library would provide a selection of appropriate materials on topics for assignments chosen by the instructor.
Example 1: For a class, an instructor might want to get one particular article that all students would read. For this situation we would provide a sufficient number of copies for all students plus the instructor (a total of 31 or whatever). We would need 24 hours to provide this material.
Example 2: For students who need to work individually with current research on various topics, instructors can provide the library with a list of topics and we would provide a designated number of articles related to each topic. The number of materials on a specific topic would be agreed upon with the instructor. (So we might provide 1-4 articles on a given topic, for example.) Instructors would need to keep the number of different topics manageable. (For a class of 30, we could provide material on up to 35 topics, which would allow all students to have some choice.) We would need at least a week's advance notice to provide this material.
Spanish translations of many materials can be provided if requested. Translations will be made using computer-translation tools provided by database providers.
Books:
Using books for research for prison-based classes is impractical in terms of individual user requests because of the difficulty in getting materials approved by the correctional center, as well as the delays imposed by simply getting requests to and from the facility.
For general, topic-based, book research:
We recommend that you have your students use a selection of reference materials or copies of book chapters, which we can prepare as in Example 2 above. We will be happy to recommend resources for this. The library has multiple subject-specific databases which can be used to provide these resources.
Use these forms to make your research requests: