Media Center

As you enter the library to the left you will see the Media Center. The Media Center houses and circulates the audiovisual collection, telecourse videos, media reserve materials and media equipment. The audiovisual collection includes DVDs, videos, cassette tapes and records and can be found in the tall bookshelves. You can also check out laptops to use in the library!

There are 15 individual media viewing carrels and 3 group viewing rooms, as well as an editing suite. Students can watch DVDs and Videos in the library, but these items may not be checked out for home use.

Circulation Desk

As you head back towards the center of the library, you will see two desks. The desk along the wall on your right is the Circulation Desk. The Circulation staff can assist you in checking out materials and can answer any questions you may have about your library records. To check out materials at the BC Library Media Center you will need to know your Student ID number.

The Circulation Desk also houses Reserve Materials. Reserve materials are items used for specific courses that have been brought to the library by instructors. Most Reserve Materials have a limited check out period, and many items are for library use only. If you need to phone the Circulation Desk to ask about your library records or reserve items, the phone number is 425-564-2252.

The Copy Center, located just past the Circulation Desk, houses two photocopy machines.

Reference Desk

The big circle desk in the center of the library is the Reference Desk. At the Reference Desk you can ask a Reference Librarian for assistance in finding library materials or researching a topic. Reference Librarians are happy to answer any question that you may have, so please stop by and ask.

You may also contact a Reference Librarian via phone or email. The phone number for the Reference Desk is 425-564-6161 and the email address is reference@bellevuecollege.edu.

Computers

As you proceed past the Circulation and Reference Desks you will come to the area with computer workstations. The Library Media Center has over 30 computers that you can use to find information in library resources and provide access to the Internet.

Printing from the computers in the library costs 10 cents per page. Please note that the computers in the Library Media Center do not have Microsoft Word or any of the Microsoft Office Suite.

Wireless Internet access is available in the Library Media Center to currently registered students.

Special Collections

Across from the computer workstations you will find 4 rows of short bookshelves. These bookshelves contain the English-as-a-Second Language collection, a collection of books for New Readers, Paperback books, Audio Books, Plays, and Newspapers. There is also a section containing materials related to the current BC Reads book.

Most of the items in the special collections can be checked out and taken home. ESL materials, New Reader books, Paperbacks, Plays and Audio Books check out for 3 weeks. The BC Reads collection of books check out for one week. Newspapers do not check out and must remain in the library.

Reference Collection

At the very far end of the library’s first floor you will find the Reference Collection. Reference books include dictionaries, atlases, general encyclopedias, and subject encyclopedias (like the Encyclopedia of Crime & Justice).

Since so many students will need to use information contained in reference books, they must be used in the library and do not check out. You are welcome to make photocopies of information that you find in Reference Books.

Circulating Collection

Head to the second floor of the library and you will find the main Circulating Book collection. There are three main sections of Circulating books, one section is to the north of the staircases and the other two sections are south of the staircases. The Circulating collection is organized using the Library of Congress Classification System. If you need help locating a book in the Circulating collection, please ask a Reference Librarian for assistance.

Circulating Books can be checked out for three weeks, and can be renewed for an additional three week period as long as no one else is waiting to use the book.

Periodical Collection (Magazines and Scholarly Journals)

While there are some periodicals on display near the Reference Desk on the first floor of the library, most of the library’s Periodicals are on the second floor of the library. The Periodicals are organized alphabetically, by the title of the periodical. You can check out Periodicals for one week.

The library subscribes to a fairly small number of periodicals in print, but we have access to thousands of periodicals through our electronic databases such as EBSCOhost and ProQuest. I'll show you how to use the databases shortly.

Study Spaces

The Library Media Center has many individual and group study spaces for you to use. You’ll find individual study carrels scattered throughout the first and second floor of the library. There are 12 group study rooms of varying size on the first floor of the library. There is also a large open study area at the north end of the library’s first floor.

The second floor of the library is home to 7 additional study rooms. Study rooms can't be reserved, they are available on a first come, first served basis. At the south end of the library’s second floor is the quiet study area. If you want a quiet, peaceful place to study, this is the place for you!

Finding Resources in the BC Library

The BC Library has many tools that can help you navigate the complex world of information. The Library Media Center website (http://bellevuecollege.edu/lmc/) links you to reliable resources that you’ll need for research projects and papers.

We’ll start with using the BC Library Catalog. Use the library catalog to find books, DVDs, videos and periodicals that the library owns. To search the library catalog, click on the link that is on the main Library Media Center website.

The library catalog allows you to search by title, author, keyword, subject or call number. Which type of search you do will depend on how much you know about the item you need. If you know the title of the book you are looking for you could do a title search. If you want to find books on a topic such as cancer, you would want to do a keyword or a subject search.

I’m going to look for the book The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Since I know the exact title, I’m going to do a title search. If the title of the book you are looking for begins with A, An or The, omit it from your search. Type “Grapes of Wrath” into the search box, make sure “Title Begins With” is highlighted, and click search.

The results page shows you that there are 7 items with the title Grapes of Wrath, 4 of which you can see here. In this case, there are several versions of the book in the library’s circulating collection, there are two copies in the ESL collection and we have a movie version.

To locate these items in the library you need two pieces of information: the library location and the call number. The library location tells you which main collection the item is in: Circulating Books, Reference Stacks, DVD Collection, etc. The call number tells you where on the shelf to look for the book.

The results tell you that we have four copies in the Circulating Book collection. If you look at the call numbers for these four items, you’ll see that they are nearly identical. All four of these books will be next to one another in the Circulating Book collection.

Title search only works if you know exactly which book you are looking for. Sometimes you just have a topic in mind and want to know what books the library owns on that topic. To find books by topic, you will want to search by subject or by keyword, which here is called "All Fields."

Subject searching is a very precise way to search but it can be a little tricky to search by subject. This library uses Library of Congress subjects, and sometimes the vocabulary that the Library of Congress uses is different from the vocabulary that you are using, which can lead to problems. "All Field" searching is much more broad, but you almost always find something. Keep in mind that with this type of search you may find too many books!

I'm interested in books on study skills, so I've typed that into the search box. I'm going to search by "All Fields," even though I may find too many books. Make sure "All Fields" is highlighted and click on the search button.

I found 84 with my "All Fields" search for "Study Skills." That's quite a few! The results are organized by relevance, but they don't really tell you how they determine that. Usually if the words from your search are in the title or subject heading for the item, it will be ranked higher. You can resort the results by author, title, or date.

Looking through the list of items, there are some books and some videos. No matter which type of search you conduct in the catalog, you still need to identify the library location and the call number to find the item in the library.

For the items you see here, the Circulating Books can be found on the second floor of the library and the items in the Media Center--Video Collection can be found on the first floor of the library. The library catalog also tells you if the book is checked in and available or checked out to another students. You can see that item #8 is checked out and not available.

The library catalog is a great resource, but it doesn’t include everything that the library has to offer. The library catalog will tell you if the library subscribes to specific magazines and newspapers, but you can’t look for magazine articles in the library catalog. To look for periodical articles, you’ll need to use a database.

The BC Library Media Center offers many databases. To see the entire listing of databases, click on the “Periodicals/Databases” link on the main library webpage. For this example, I’m going to search the database EBSCOhost. EBSCOhost is a large, general database that contains information on many topics. Since EBSCOhost (and our other main database ProQuest) is used by so many students, we’ve added a link to the database on the main library webpage. Click on the link to enter the database.

The library subscribes to EBSCOhost, so we need to make sure you are a BC student in order to use the resource. When you’re on campus you won’t have any problem since the database will recognize that you are using a computer at BC. When you try to access EBSCOhost from a computer that is not on campus, you will need to enter your Student ID number and your last name. The database then checks with BC’s registration system to make sure that you’re a registered student. Once you’ve done this, you should be able to search with no problems!

EBSCOhost is such a big database that it first asks you which part of the database you want to search. I’m going to use Academic Search Complete since it contains many articles on many different topics.

I want to find articles that discuss study skills in college. I need to be careful in how I phrase my search or I may get some very unusual results. If I type “study skills in college,” EBSCOhost will look for that exact phrase. I’m going to break my search into two main ideas: “study skills” and “college.”

To search for articles that contain these two ideas, combine the two parts with AND. Your search will look like this: study skills AND college. This search will look for any article that contains these two elements. They don’t have to be in a particular order and they don’t have to be in the same sentence, but both have to be in the article somewhere!

When searching, I find it helpful to limit my search to full text articles, so I always check the “Full Text” box on the main page. This ensures that everything I find is full text in the database and I can read the entire article right away.

I found 251 full text articles. That’s pretty good. I can narrow my results to magazine articles or academic journals by clicking on the categories on the left side of the screen. EBSCOhost also lists some recommended subjects to the left of your results.

The results list gives you a summary of each article. If you would like more information about a specific article, click on the article title (in blue) to look at the entire record for that item.

Articles are listed so that the most recent article is at the top of the list. You can resort your results by using the "Sort By" drop-down menu. EBSCOhost allows you to sort by Date, Source, Author, or Relevance.

At the top of the item record, you see the title of the article, the author, and the source. We call this bibliographic information and you would use this information when citing this article in a paper or research project.

The full text will either be in HTML format and included as part of the record or as linked PDF file. In our case, the full text is in PDF format and you would need to click in the PDF Full Text link at the top of the page to open the article.

Keep in mind that if you don't limit to full text, you may find articles that you can't read online (and may not be available in the library).

When you have found an article that you think will be useful for your research, it’s a good idea to email the article to yourself. Then you will have the record for the article and the full text in your personal email.

Create a folder in your email for all of your results and then when you need to take a look at what you have found, everything will be in one place.

You can also print out articles when you find them. Here in the library we charge 10 cents per page for printing, so that can add up very quickly!