Ana: Welcome to the Memorial Library audio tour! I’m Ana and I work at circulation. I’ll be your guide today. This tour will take you through some of the many spaces the library has to offer. Maybe you’re looking for a new study spot. Maybe you’re embarking on a research project. Or maybe you just want to find out what this unparalleled campus resource has to offer. This is the place to start. Along the way, we’ll hear voices from staff sharing their expertise on particular areas. We’ll also share tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your library experience. Let’s begin by heading to the room on your left. This tour will resume at the circulation desk. Tap play on the next audio file when you’re ready.

Ana: The circulation desk is the hub for anything related to books. Circulation Services Coordinator Cate Booth will tell you more about the resources available here.

Cate: So Circulation is primarily checking out books, checking out materials from the library and handling requests from campus libraries, UW System Libraries, Interlibrary Loan, our Big Ten partners, anywhere that patrons are requesting materials from. So primarily, circulation happens at the circulation desk on the first floor of Memorial Library. And that’s a good place to start for any kind of circulation questions. We also have some circulation support in the circulation office, which is in Room 170 in Memorial Library. The circulation desk is open the whole time that Memorial Library is open. As long as the building’s open, the circulation desk is open. And the circulation office is open Monday through Friday, 8 AM to noon and 1 to 4. We help patrons with everything from renewing their materials, checking on due dates for materials, any kind of requesting questions. We also assist with blocked accounts or things like fines and fees. And all of that can be helped either at the circulation desk or at the circulation office for more complex questions. We also assist with access issues, so people who are new to campus who are trying to get their library services up and running, or if people are having issues with their account. The circulation desk is kind of a good first stop if you have any kind of question about library services, even if you think it might be more of an in-depth research question. The circulation desk is a good place to start because the staff there can direct you to other services or other support, either in the building or kind of across campus libraries.

Ana: Just beyond the black gates is the West Corridor. This area is technically separate from the library, so don’t leave unless you’re willing to go back to the entrance on State Street to get back inside. This is where you’ll find the computer lab, along with additional study spaces. Now, let’s head back to the lobby. Walk past the elevators, and just to your left is the next stop on our tour: the North Stacks.

Ana: Welcome to the famous North Stacks. Constructed in 1950 along with the rest of the old library, they were never intended for public access. Back then, patrons had to request books and then wait in the reading rooms. Library staff ventured into the stacks and brought out the books. However, now you and all of our other library patrons get to enjoy roaming the vast shelves. The stacks might seem intimidating at first, but the Memorial Library Stack Guide is helpful in demystifying them. It’s a feature on the library website where you can enter the call number of a book you’re interested in. It will then show you a map of the area where that book can be found. Another renowned feature of the stacks are the study cages, or carrels. They’re located along the south wall of every floor of the North Stacks. Unlocked carrels can be used by anyone. Locked carrels can be reserved for semester-long use by graduate students. They’re not exactly everyone’s speed, but sometimes a locked metal box is what you need to be productive. When you’re ready to move on, let’s head back to the lobby and take the stairs or elevator down to the basement. Then, follow the signs for Mills Music Library, where we’ll pick back up.

Ana: The Mills Music Library is UW-Madison’s repository for all media related to music. Here to tell you more about this is Music Public Services Librarian Tom Caw.

Tom: The primary users of Mills Music Library would be students and faculty, mostly in the school of music. We are here for everyone, though. We’re here for all of the campus, all majors, all departments, anyone who has a music information need. We also do see quite a fair amount of community members coming in. We have in the Mills Music Library our big reading room with all the public use computers. We have several large tables which are quite popular with students. The stacks area is quite large. We have the biggest collection of music materials in the state of Wisconsin here. That is the open stacks for browsing for books and scores. We have a lot of staff only areas, of course, where we retrieve the CDs, DVDs, LPs, cassettes, any of the audiovisual materials, as well as our vast array of special collections and archival materials, which is another part of what we do here. We don’t collect in only one area. We have all types of classical music, we have a wide array of popular music, folk music from around the world, different traditions. We collect in all language groups. I think we’re up to around 40,000 compact discs right now. We know that not everyone at this point in time has a way to even play back CDs or DVDs, so we have external optical disc drives now that we check out. We have, I don’t know, 80,000 or so LPs, and we have turntables here in the library for patron use. We’re always happy to teach people how to use them if they’ve never listened to a record on a turntable. We do have 78-rpm records. All the audiovisual materials circulate except the 78-rpm records because they’re too fragile for us to let them go out. People take advantage of that, and I’m very happy they do because libraries are for use! We also have a concentrated focus on Wisconsin music. We have reel-to-reel tapes from recordings of, say, fiddlers playing in someone’s kitchen that are part of collections pertaining to the upper Midwestern vernacular folk music traditions. And we’re all about facilitating access to our materials because that, ultimately, is why I’m here as a librarian, is to gather, collect, describe, preserve materials and make them accessible to as many people as possible for as long as possible.

Ana: The next stop on our tour is the Reference department. Use the elevators or stairs to get to the 2nd floor, where the tour will resume.

Ana: The reference department is one of the most useful areas in the library. Reference Librarian Rebecca Payne will tell you more about the resources available here.

Rebecca: The reference area is a place where students, faculty, staff, community users, visitors can ask questions of staff. Our mission is to connect users to resources and information. So that can be an undergraduate student getting started with a research paper, asking, you know, “How do I get started?” It can mean a graduate student who’s working on a literature review for their master’s thesis or dissertation. It can mean a faculty member who’s getting started on research for a new publication. Resources that are available on the 2nd floor: So we have collections on the 2nd floor, we have reference materials, so things like encyclopedias and dictionaries in various subjects. We also have the Grants Information Collection, so we have databases by which to access information about who can fund your education or projects of your nonprofit organization. There are also some print materials that are related to finding scholarships or finding grants. Also on the 2nd floor is a government documents collection. So the area provides a variety of study and work spaces. So there are some open tables that people can use, and the space is intended to be a collaborative space where students or anyone can talk with one another and collaborate. There are printers that people can use, so people can print using our computers or their own computer. There are scanners where people can scan books that they find or articles that they find in a paper format. And there are also copiers and scanners, copiers that serve as scanners. There is a kiosk where people who do not have a Wiscard–so the Wiscard is used as a print card, but for those who do not have a Wiscard there’s a kiosk from which you can purchase with cash a print card. Just next to the reference desk is an area where there’s special equipment for viewing non-book materials, we call these microforms. They take the form of either cards or film, it’s basically microfilm or microfiche, it’s a format where the print is reduced in such a way that it makes it easier to store. It also preserves the material. So a lot of materials are available in a digitized form, but we do have a number of resources such as newspaper or primary source material that’s in this format. And so that room provides the equipment for viewing such material. We also have audio-visual equipment as well, so for viewing VHS or DVD. Librarians became librarians because we like questions. Not only do we like getting questions and like answering questions, but it’s our job to do that. We’re eager to receive all kinds of questions.

Ana: Now that we’ve seen what the reference department has to offer, let’s head up to the 4th floor. The tour will continue in the lobby just outside of the elevators.

Ana: The 4th floor of Memorial contains many resources worth highlighting. To start, let’s visit a reading room. Enter the North Stacks and turn right. Follow the wall with the carrels, and keep watching for a doorway through the shelves to your left. This is the entrance to the East Asian Reading Room. The tour will continue in there.

Ana: This large reading room is a great place to get work done in peace and quiet. Other reading rooms can be found in similar locations on the 2nd and 1st floors. While you’re here, be sure to check out the display cases. You might glimpse anything from Japanese kimonos to antique Tibetan books. East Asian Studies is one of the area studies disciplines that the Libraries specialize in. Here to tell you more about the area studies is African Studies Librarian Emilie Songolo.

Emilie: Area studies is a technical phrase which means the study of other geographic areas than the US and Canada. The different ones are African Studies, South Asian Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, the Slavic country area studies, West European Area Studies (cause the Slavic countries are in the East European area studies), the Middle Eastern Studies, and Latin American Studies. Our role is to basically connect the students and faculty and anyone else who’s interested in these areas to the resources. Our responsibility is to build collections and manage collections and make sure that students discover the materials that we buy. These materials range from books, journals, databases, photographs, we have amazing textile from Laos and Africa, we have maps. The university allocates a lot of money to continue building these collections, because to get these materials, you know, one has to also know certain ways of getting them. Sometimes the university gives us funding to travel to go on the ground to look for materials and buy them. And it’s also our role has been evolving because in the past, you know, students did not see us, they may not even be aware of area studies. We have more courses on campus teaching these areas. Explore the website to figure out who the resources people resources are, and what the material resources are, because we have a lot! We are one of the major campuses in the country for area studies because we have a long history of building collections in our libraries and providing services. We give individual consultations, so students can make an appointment, see a librarian, and the librarian prepares the consultation so that everything is tailored to the research for that project that student is working on. And I always tell students, you know, don’t just try to figure it out. We’re here for you. And your tuition money actually is helping buy these materials. And we’re very delighted to work with students and anyone else who is interested in area studies because the courses are just a lot of courses around campus teaching area studies or having an area content.

Ana: When you’re ready, return to the elevator lobby through the North Stacks. Turn left and enter the South Stacks, where the tour will continue.

Ana: Welcome to the South Stacks. These were added to the library as a part of an expansion in 1986. A unique feature of the South Stacks is the compact moveable shelving. Go ahead and press one of the arrow buttons at the end of a row of shelving. The shelves will pull apart, allowing you access to the books inside. The South Stacks also offer reservable group study rooms. On this floor, these are 477 and 479. Group study rooms accomodate around 6 people and have a whiteboard. Sometimes a projector is available too. The library website can be used to reserve one of these rooms. Once you’ve explored the South Stacks, head back to the elevator lobby. If you’re a grad student and have registered for access, use your Wiscard to swipe into Room 464 right across from the elevators. If not, it’s time to visit the last stop on the tour: Special Collections. Use elevator #5 next to the entrance of the South Stacks. Take the elevator to floor 9R, where the tour will continue.

Ana: This room is a collaborative space for graduate students. Grad student Junzi Huang will give you more information on this resource.

Junzi: I’m Junzi, I’m a graduate student in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. So I’m pretty familiar with the space, and I’m really thankful that we have had this space for over a couple years already. This is a nice collaborative space. We use that for quiet study, use that for discussion, and use that for taking a nap during the day (it’s pretty comfy)! I guess that something unique and special about the space is that graduate students there form a kind of silent collaboration among each other. You have this atmosphere that you can immerse and to focus on your work, and also you can use the discussion room to have group study and to have group discussion and presentation like job talks or presentations for a conference. And I think they have pretty nice space. For those people who do not have offices, that’s a pretty great space to meet your friends there and then study and read together. You need to be an enrolled graduate student and then have your Wiscard, going to the Circulation Desk, and then ask the supervisor to enroll you. That shouldn’t take more than 2 minutes. This is a big research university and research library. The resources here are comprehensive and highly selected, have very high academic quality, which is something that I think every graduate student, if you major in humanities or social science, you might want to do some more exploration in the space. And then you end up finding more resources than you expect to find.

Ana: When you’re ready to move on, head back out to the elevator lobby. Use elevator #5 next to the entrance of the South Stacks. Take the elevator to floor 9R, where the tour will continue.

Ana: Welcome to the home of the most valuable books on campus: Special Collections. Public Services Coordinator Lisa Wettleson will let you know about these precious resources and how you can use them.

Lisa: All sorts of materials that need special care, handling, conservation, and especially anything printed before 1800 (or 1830 depending on the country of origin where the materials came from). So we have lots of materials that are rare in the sense that they are unique. We store everything in temperature- and humidity-controlled vaults. So we’re known for history of science, that’s how we got our start in the 40s with the Thordarson Collection, natural history, natural philosophy is what it used to be called. Botanical books, ornithological books, history of chemistry and alchemy, we have very specific collections of those, a couple. In terms of the English and American literature, we have something called the Cairns Collection of North American Women Writers. So everybody’s allowed to use Special Collections. We’re a public institution, we welcome everybody here. So we get researchers from all over the world, although not everybody necessarily comes here. We often are asked for scans, or asked to pull out something and look through that item to answer some questions about it. And we have lots of classes and other groups coming for tours, or sessions where we bring out a variety of materials to show them that kind of correspond to the curriculum of their particular course. And then as well, community users or community groups that we might do especially, say, a tour of the current exhibit. Things like that.

Ana: While the materials in Special Collections are available for use, they cannot be checked out.

Lisa: Well, you do sort of check them out, you just can’t leave with them. So as of a year and a half ago, we now have an online account system. What they do is they basically create a list or like a shopping cart in their account, and then they schedule those for the day they think they’re gonna come in, and then we have them pulled and ready. So it really streamlines the process. We have lockers for folks to lock up most of their belongings, and then come out to our reference desk where our reading room is, and then talk to our staff and we get you set up with that account or pulling the materials for you. And then you view them in our reading room. Folks are welcome to take images of the materials here for their research or just their own personal use.

Ana: Special Collections also hosts an exhibit of books from its collection, centered around a particular theme.

Lisa: We currently are doing three exhibits per year, so roughly one per semester and then one over the summer. It just varies, you know there might be an important anniversary of something coming up, or somebody has an idea. We also partner with other subject librarians or other folks on campus.

Ana: This is where the audio tour ends. While this tour gives you an overview, the resources Memorial Library has to offer goes far beyond what was featured here. We encourage you to discover new spaces and tools to help you succeed. If you have any questions, a librarian is never far away and will be happy to help you! Thanks for exploring with us!