Director's Welcome, Fall 2010

Welcome to Monmouth College and Hewes Library, your academic resource center! The library staff is looking forward to introducing you to the resources and services of the library over the course of the next year and beyond. The library will be opening earlier on weekdays at 7:30am along with our new Einstein Brother’s Bagel franchise! It’s already been a very busy place during the first week of classes.

Hewes Library has over 310,000 books, periodicals, government documents and videos to fill your information needs. We provide access to approximately 100 online databases, which includes full-text access to articles in over 18,000 periodicals, all accessible through our Hewes Library web site. Over the past year we’ve added some exciting new databases, including Music Online with hundreds of thousands of musical works, including popular, classical, jazz, folk, and international pieces. American History in Video offers nearly 5,000 video historical documentaries, some from History Channel or A&E, as well as news reels covering historic events of past times. These can be accessed on any network computers or on your personal computers any time of day or night, along with all of our databases.

Since July 2007 Hewes Library has been a member of the I-SHARE consortium catalog that allows the sharing of catalog information, as well as, the collections of 76 academic libraries in the state of Illinois. For those items that we do not own, our students and faculty have enjoyed the opportunity to directly request items from any of the I-SHARE libraries through the I-SHARE “universal catalog”. For journal articles and other items not available through our I-SHARE consortium libraries, we continue to provide our new ILLiad Interlibrary Loan services for materials from any of thousands of libraries in the United States. The library staff will be happy to answer any questions you have any time on locating the resources you need.

Our lovely surroundings include the Barnes Electronic Classroom suitable for computer instruction and presentations and a more open HL124 for classes experimenting with tablet PC technology. Throughout the building, ample study space is combined with wireless network access that allows you to use your own laptop within the library. Several special collections reside on the Upper Level: the Rare Book Collection, the James C. Shields Collection of Ancient Art and Antiquities, and the Len G. Everett Galleries. An exhibit of native American artifacts on the upper level lounge area will be going up sometime this semester. Also new this fall to the Lower Level is the Archaeology Research Lab (HL11A).

The library is also celebrating its 150th anniversary as a Federal Depository of U.S. Government Publications. Monmouth College is the fourth oldest federal depository in the United States dating back to 1860 when the program was officially created by an act of Congress.

Please take advantage of the rich resources and helpful information on our library website and feel free to seek help from the library staff. We’re looking forward to working with you.

Cheers,

J. Richard Sayre
Library Director