Services

Education & Training

  • Reference Hours in the Life Sciences Library:  8-5, Monday - Friday, or by appointment. 
    Drop in, or give us a call (49-42910) and ask to speak with one of the librarians.

  • Ask a librarian for a one-on-one training session. We'll work with you to identify the best resources for your research, help you build a comprensive search strategy, help you set up SDIs, etc. For one-on one sessions please contact:

  • Faculty: Invite a librarian to teach your class how to find the information they need.  We often create special flyers or webpages tailored to fit the needs of specific classes.

  • Faculty: Submit your "library exercises" to a librarian for review, prior to the assignment. This allows us to be better prepared for you students when they come in.
    • Please send your assignments to Monica Kirkwood (49-47873; monicacu@purdue.edu) at the Life Sciences Library, Lilly Hall.
    • We'll be glad to recommend additional resources for your students.
    • Additionally, prior knowledge about your goals for an assignment allows us to provide better guidance to your students when they appear at our Reference Desk.
       
  • Visit the Purdue Libraries' Instruction page, for yet more information and resources!

Recommend a purchase.

Students and professors are urged to let us know if there are books or journals they'd recommend that we purchase for the Life Sciences Library.  Please send a note to Vicki Killion, Life Sciences Librarian (vkillion@purdue.edu).

Instructions to Professors for putting materials on Reserve in the Life Sciences Library

 

To ensure that your students have access to class Reserve materials at the beginning of the semester, please send in the Reserves Submission Form for Reserve materials at least 2 weeks before the beginning of the semester.  For materials that have to be ordered (new books or requested from other libraries), please send your request as soon as possible!

Reserve Item Types

We can place on Reserve the following types of material:

  • Books from the Life Sciences Library.
  • Books from other Purdue Libraries.
  • Copies of class notes, homework, exams.
  • Photocopies of articles or book chapters, subject to the limitations noted below due to copyright restrictions.

Copyright Restrictions

Due to copyright restrictions, we can accept photocopies for Reserve as follows

  • For BOOK CHAPTERS:
    We will place on Reserve one copy of one chapter, not to exceed 10 percent of the whole book.  Exceptions to this limit will be made only if the book is on order or is verified to be out of print.
  • For JOURNAL ARTICLES:
    We will place on Reserve only one copy of an article.

Submitting Reserve Requests

  1. Fill out a Reserve Submission Form for each class for which you want materials placed on Reserve.  Note:  If you have placed materials on Reserve in the past, stipulating that they should permanently be on Reserve, we still have to have the form submitted to verify that the material is still needed.
  2. Provide a black, three-ring notebook for any class notes, homework or exams to which you will have material added each week.  If using the same materials as in previous years and they are barcoded, please resubmit the barcoded material.
    Note: We would like to urge you to mount this kind of material on the Web rather than placing it on Reserve in the Library. 
  3. Send the completed Reserve Submission Form(s) at least 2 weeks before the beginning of the semester.  We would prefer submission via an email attachment, although receipt of a printed version is acceptable.  Send to:

Pat Miller, Reserves Assistant
Life Sciences Library
Purdue University Libraries LIFE
email:  patri@purdue.edu

Please contact Pat Miller, 49-45758 or patri@purdue.edu, if you have any questions.

Support for ProCite, Reference Manager or EndNote.

Many professors and graduate students are using the database management programs EndNote, ProCite or Reference Manager to create a personal databases of citations to books and journal articles in their research & teaching interest area(s).  Newer versions of these programs allow the user to connect directly from the program to locally mounted databases such as the Purdue Catalog and the OVID databases (e.g., Current Contents, Medline). Find here the files or instructions for modifying your program so you can do this.

Instructions for downloading the ICA client.

Currently some e-resources are not available via a web subscription.  In order to provide campus-wide access to these, the Purdue Libraries and PUCC have set up several WTS (Windows terminal servers).  You will need to download a sort of "plugin", that will work with your browser, to access these resources.
Among the titles of interest to life scientists that are available via WTS:

Patents

The Siegesmund Engineering Library receives current issues of U.S. Patents and maintain collections of earlier-issued patents (1950-date). CASSIS (Classification and Search SupportInformation System) and other CD-ROM products for searching patent and trademark information are available. Access the Engineering Libraries patent page for more information about patent searching at Purdue. See, also, the U.S. Patent Office [USPTO] site, to search for patent information and get the full-text of U.S. patents back to 1976.

SDI Auto Alerts

What is SDI?  Well, SDI stands for "Selective Dissemination of Information".  Still unclear?  Well, actually, SDI is a pretty exciting feature.  With it, you can create a search in a database, and then request that the search be automatically re-run at regular intervals for you.  Results of the search will be sent to your email address.  Only new records that have been added to the database during the interval between SDIs will be sent to you.  SDI's may be created for any OVID or SilverPlatter database.  Most folks create SDIs in the Current Contents database, since it is updated weekly (most other databases are updated monthly or quarterly).  Contact a librarian for help creating one.

Last update: October 6, 2009

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