Mississippi Valley State University James H. White Library

1. Mississippi Valley State University James H. White Library Graduate Students Orientation Guide

2. Welcome Welcome to Mississippi Valley State University’s James H. White Library. As a graduate student, who is ready to do advanced study and research, you have come to the right place. The James H. White Library holds 213,860 volumes (118,496 print book titles, approximately), 402 print journals/periodicals, 2,200 full-text electronic periodicals, 23 daily print newspapers, 4,026 video titles, 38,595 electronic book titles.

3. Circulation Privileges The Circulation Department of the James H. White Library is happy to assist all students in locating library materials. A current MVSU Id is required to check out materials. Circulation Privileges for graduate students are inclusive of: • 10 titles at one check out period • 3 week check out period • 1 renewal request • 2 Videos, CDs or DVDs for a 1 week period For any title not found in the collection use ILLiad to request title via interlibrary loan.

4. Research/Study Carrels The James H. White Library offers research/study carrels free of charge for faculty, graduate, honor and senior students who require close working proximity to the library collections. Carrels provide a controlled work space but are not designed to replace an office or conference setting. The highest priority for assignment is given to faculty, graduate and honor college students with specific research projects requiring intensive library research (i.e. Master’s thesis, senior thesis and publications).

5. Research/Study Carrels cont. Availability: There are 17 research carrels located on the second floor of the James H. White Library. Eligibility: Research carrels are assigned to MVSU faculty and currently enrolled MVSU students. A valid MVSU ID card must be presented when you receive the assigned carrel key. Keys: The research carrel key is the responsibility of the carrel occupant and cannot/should not be loaned to others. Only one key per carrel is issued. Library staff will not open carrel for students. Failure to return carrel key by due date will result in a $5.00 per day fine. With a maximum fine of $25.00. If the key is lost or misplaced, resulting in having the lock re-keyed a charge of $40.00 will be assessed to the patron. Assignment Procedure: Applications are available at the circulation desk. Notification of assignment is made via email or phone. The key must be picked up 10 days after notification, otherwise, the carrel will be assigned to another user.

6. The Card Catalog (HERBIE) For the “Valley of Scholars”, research begins with access to the library’s collections at the online card catalog, Herbie. This essential research tool will tell you what the library owns. In the card catalog you will find the location of all library materials such as books, cds, videos, journals, DVDs and electronic books. Those titles that are specifically designated for graduate students will be indicated as such in the card catalog (i.e. Graduate Bioinformatics, Graduate Business). The card catalog (Herbie) also provides students with their circulation records. You can log into the card catalog using your last name and social security number or your MVSU ID number, to see if you have outstanding fines/fees or just to remind yourself what titles you already have checked out.

7. Online Resources As a graduate student you have a lot to do and not much time in which to do it. This orientation guide can help. The library has a plethora of online information resources to help support your academic research, including thousands of e-journals and full-text journal article databases. Information about accessing these databases can be found on the library’s webpage under Online Resources or click on the Do You Need Help link to access Virtual Reference to ask for assistance.

8. Research Assistance The James H. White Library has qualified librarians available to assist graduate students with their research needs. Stop by the library to make an appointment with a librarian who will sit with you in a one-on-one consultation to you the student with research or contact the library at 662-254-3494 to schedule a consultation.

9. Turnitin Plagiarism Software The James H. White Library offers MVSU faculty access to Turnitin Plagiarism Software. (http://www.turnitin.com) • Plagiarism Prevention Recognized worldwide as the standard in online plagiarism prevention, Turnitin helps educators and students take full advantage of the internet's educational potential.

10. Turnitin Plagiarism Software • A Proven Solution Used by thousands of institutions in over eighty countries, Turnitin’s comprehensive plagiarism prevention system lets you quickly and effectively check all of your students’ work in a fraction of the time necessary to scan a few suspect papers using a search engine. • A Complete Search Every paper submitted is returned in the form of a customized Originality Report. Results are based on exhaustive searches of billions of pages from both current and archived instances of the internet, millions of student papers previously submitted to Turnitin, and commercial databases of journal articles and periodicals.

11. THE END This presentation was revised on August 27, 2010 Mantra Henderson, MLIS