Did You Know....Ways to Find and Browse New Books?

At the end of last week, I updated our display of Sawyer Library New Books in the case outside our front door. Stop by and take a look!

And here's a little known fact: The books in that display case should also be on our shelves available for check-out. How can a book be in two places at once, you ask? Well, I hate tying up new books in a display case, so what you actually see in the display are the dust wrappers of new books covering old "dummy" volumes. Therefore, any book you see in the case should actually be on our shelves waiting for you to check it out--unless another user beat you to it, of course.

That brings me to saying a few words about where and how to find new books at Sawyer Library. Those that are not being used as Reserve readings for the current session, should be in one of two places. If the book was received quite recently, it is probably on our "Sawyer Library New Books" case, which is next to the stairs on our entrance level, right across from the shorter end of our Reference Desk. Books are shelved in call number order there, so you can find a specific book you want and quite easily browse by subject.

If a book is currently on the "New Books" Shelf, it will have that designation in the online catalog. For example:

We generally remove new books from that shelf when they have been displayed for three months or when we run out of room, whichever happens first. So, if a book has been in our collection for four months, there's a good chance that the location would simply read "Sawyer," meaning that the book--if not checked out--would be in our general book stacks on the 4th Floor (two levels up from our entrance).

There's another way to electronically browse our recent books, and that is by looking at a file that our esteemed Technical Services Librarian, Becky, produces from time to time. This can be found from the main homepage of the online catalog. This list is called Sawyer Library / New Acquisitions and can be scrolled through, or browsed by Library of Congress Classification Subject, when you click on the appropriate jump button.

Of course, another way to see what's new is to simply do a keyword search in the online catalog for a word, words or phrase of your choice. The keyword search sorts by both relevance and date, so the most recent and most relevant items should appear at the top of any results list you get. And remember, if you get too many results from Law or some other Suffolk library, you can simply use the limiting "scope" option at the top of the screen to specify that the book must be in Sawyer Library.