Public Areas and Resources

STERLING NAVE

Circulation Desk

Here one may charge out library materials, place holds, recall materials charged to someone else, request that books be paged from the SML stacks, and request assistance in locating materials in the stacks. Books from most other Yale libraries may be requested here as well through the Eli Express service. All of these standard circulation services may also be completed using the Place Requests feature from any search results page of the online catalog, Orbis.

Circulation and Access Services
SML Circulation Policies
Stack Directory

Reference Desk

The librarians and reference assistants at the Reference Desk provide assistance with the identification of sources on a particular subject, the location of materials, or questions concerning the library's operations and procedures. Librarians can also provide information about a number of special services that the library offers such as interlibrary loan, book acquisitions, and the many electronic databases to which Yale provides access. The reference staff is available during regular hours.

Orbis and the Card Catalog

Orbis, together with Morris, the catalog of the Law Library, is Yale's online catalog, which represents the Library's catalog records that have been converted to electronic form; currently Orbis contains over five million records. These records represent all materials cataloged since 1977, an increasing number of records for materials cataloged before 1977 as the Library undertakes a "retrospective conversion" of its card records, and brief records for many older materials which have circulated since 1981. The Library's major project to convert the information remaining in the card catalog to electronic records should be complete by 2002. 

Orbis and a wide variety of other networked information resources can be accessed through any networked computer on campus, including those in the College computer clusters and personal computers in student rooms, and also off campus (using Yale's Internet service or the proxy server). Within Sterling, computer workstations offering access to Orbis as well as to the Internet and the Web are located behind the Subject Section of the card catalog, in the Periodical Reading Room, on each stack level, and on the upper level of the Cross Campus Library as well. Two tables in the Starr Main Reference Room permit modem and Ethernet connections for notebook computers. The Library's Web site offers fast and easy access to Orbis, to many databases to which the Library subscribes, to other libraries' catalogs, and to general information about the libraries at Yale.

Removal of Sterling's Card Catalog.

CD-ROM Reference Center

The CD-ROM Reference Center across from the Reference Desk is a cluster of workstations which provide access to a variety of reference resources, bibliographies, and indexes in electronic form. These workstations are not networked, so it is necessary to come into the Library to use the sources located on them.

PUBLIC READING ROOMS

The Starr Main Reference Room (First Floor) houses the main reference collection in Sterling. This is a non-circulating collection that has been carefully developed to contain materials that will provide answers to factual questions -- such as general and specialized encyclopedias, language dictionaries, biographical dictionaries, handbooks, and directories -- as well as bibliographies, indexes, and abstracts in the social sciences and humanities. The arrangement of the collection is primarily by call number, but standard indexes and abstracts, including newspaper indexes are shelved in index cases just inside the entrance to the Room The National Union Catalog in shelved in the back of the reference room annex.

Newspaper Reading Room (First Floor) houses Sterling's current newspaper collection, numbering over 200 titles. Recent issues from all over the world are on open shelves. United States newspapers are shelved down the left side of the room, alphabetically by title. Foreign titles are shelved down the right side of the room by broad geographic area. A list of the newspapers, arranged by geographic area, is kept on the old service desk, and is also available on the Newspaper Reading Room Web page. 

Microform Reading Room (Basement) contains Sterling's extensive microfilm and microfiche collections, as well as several very useful CD-ROMs indexing newspapers and manuscript materials. The Microform Reading Room Web page includes a list of major microform collections. The room is open and staffed whenever Sterling is open.

Franke Periodical Reading Room (First Floor) houses the current issues of about 5,800 of the over 63,000 journals and other serials received by the library system. The current issues are arranged in this room in broad subject areas, such as History or Literature, in order to facilitate browsing the current literature of a field. Each of these subject areas shelves in one of the 20 numbered sections of the room. Within each section, the arrangement is alphabetical by title. Although Sterling has no separate section for all bound periodicals, as do many other libraries, the bound issues of approximately 90 of the most heavily-used journals, including popular titles such as Time and Newsweek, are shelved in the annex off the Franke Periodical Reading Room.

Linonia and Brothers Reading Room (First Floor) is called the L&B Room, for Linonia and Brothers in Unity, the names of two eighteenth-century Yale debating societies that donated their libraries to the University when the central library was formed. It has historically been a room devoted to reading and research, which it still is. It is also the location of four independent collections: the L&B collection, a collection designed for leisure reading and browsing; a travel collection; a large collection of historical series that support medieval studies; and the Library’s new book shelves, which contain a selection of recent additions to Sterling’s collections.

Send comments to smlref@yale.edu