On Monday October 5^th 2015, the class of SF-197 went on a tour to the visit the library at 2:30pm. The Mildred Frank Sawyer Library, located on the 2^nd floor of the 73 Tremont Building. The library has three floors, 2^nd floor, 3^rd floor, and the 4^th floor. Every floor has it’s own layout, the 2^nd floor was for reference books, circulation desk, networked printers, photocopiers and scanners. The 3^rd floor has a lot of study rooms, study tables and carrels, which also has photocopiers and scanners, a library instruction room, and restrooms. The 4^th floor, also called the quite study floor, because it’s so quite, you can hear the flies flapping their wings. Most students study there.

When I first went to the library on the second floor which is the entrance level, a guide named Linzie gathered us all together. We gathered near the Reference desk, there, we all checked our names for attendance. She talked about some things like the hours of the library, it’s open weekdays, from 8am till Midnight, and on weekends, from 8am till 8pm. After everyone has arrived, we went to the 3^rd floor, in a room full of computers. All these computers are controlled by a single computer that guide Linzie controls. We all sat on each computer there, and the library web page was open www.suffolk.edu/sawlib on the computer. You can know almost everything about the library here, from books you want search in the library database, to even asking a librarian online. To book a study room, you have to click the ‘Book group study rooms’, when you click it, you will get a table that you can select the room, time and date you want the study room to be.

So, you don’t know what’s the name of the book you want, but you know what it contains. On the “Search Library Resources” section, click ‘OneSearch’, if we searched “Sustainability”, you will get every source that contains Sustainability in it. That’s amazing! But, you will get a 14k result of sources that is about sustainability, and that’s a bit hard to find the book that you want, so you can limit it to the year the book was created, let’s say the book that we want has to be in 2015, you will get 1k books that has sustainability in it, from 14k to 1k. But that’s not all, you can limit it even more! The subject of the book, it has to be about ‘Sustainable Development’, you will get only 150 results that has it’s subject about sustainable development. Want to limit it even more?? You can! We also want to have the subject to be about ‘Climate Change’. You will get only 7 books that has it’s subject about sustainable development, and climate change. So from 14,000 to only 7 books, that’s a really cool and useful feature to have.

Finally, let’s search for our book called “Beyond Smoke and Mirrors”, to do that, you go to ‘Books’ in “Search Library Resources” section, and search Beyond Smoke and Mirrors. You can either choose the electric (ebook) version of the book, or the one you will find in the library. Click the latter, there you will find the author, publisher, the contents of the book, and you can know if it’s available or not. And that’s another really nice feature to have.