The Library: More Than Just A College Bar

Almost every college town in the nation has a bar called The Library. This way, when you and your friends go out on a Tuesday night and your mom calls, you don’t need to tell her you’re drinking. Instead of answering, you can ignore the call, then text her saying “I’m at the library.” She’ll assume you’re diligently studying in a campus building full of books among other students doing the same and you didn’t even have to lie to her. Who knew the library could be so useful?

Photo Credit: Lacrosse Public Library

If that first paragraph didn’t tell you anything new, you might be surprised to learn that campus libraries can actually be very useful in more ways than you expect.

Of course we all know when the professor assigns a research project our student resources can be accessed at the library. English classes often require us to read dozens of pieces of literature, which can sometimes only be found at the library. Even if you don’t need anything to read from the library, many of us still find it to be a comfortable place to study where the lights remain on all night and silence dominates the room as an unbreakable rule. But even looking past all of these reasons to use your campus library, students have numerous reasons to take advantage of the resources available through the library.

Have you ever had a question that you didn’t find an answer for on Google? From politics and religion to medicine and geology, there is an unprecedented wealth of information at our fingertips using Google to search the internet, but sometimes this brings us to conflicting and poorly supported ideas as we jump from page to page. As a student at a university, you have access to an even deeper well full of research and conclusions supported by scientific data. I might sound like a nerd by suggesting that you read scientific literature, but asking questions and seeking answers is something we’re supposed to do in college and relying on Google search results for everything may not be the best way to do that.

This is a way for you to take advantage of academic resources available only to those with access to certain databases. You pay for this in your student fees, and not using it while you’re in college could even be called a waste of money. But there are numerous other resources which you may not be aware of that also contribute to the learning environment on your dollar. Students should look into these kinds of services as they are paid for by us and meant to help us.

At my school, Texas A&M University, we have a writing center at the library guaranteed to improve any student’s grade who wants help with writing. Current and former students specifically trained to teach others to write effectively are available to help anyone who sets up an appointment, and this is at no cost to the student. People are being paid to look at your writing and tell you how to make it better, and here at A&M this consistently improves grades. If you got a B on your last essay, a service like this could make it an A next time; you just need to make it to your campus library.

Photo Credit:Flickr.com / Paul Lowry

Another way to effectively use the resources of the library is to schedule a study room for yourself and friends. You can always just go to the library whenever you want, and you might even be able to get a room without reserving one, but one secret to forming good study habits is to make a reservation and stick to it. You can always tell yourself you’ll study tomorrow and it can be pretty easy to put it off when the day comes. But if you schedule yourself for a certain time in a certain room, you’ll feel more obligated to go and you might even get some work done while you’re there. This is a great way to get yourself to study and for friends to pressure each other into studying.

Having a library to go to for drinks is a pretty nice feature of college towns, but having a campus library full of books, academic resources, tutoring, and other services can be  just as great. The internet brings information from all over the world to our fingertips, which is the case for anyone with access to a computer. But as college students we have even more of these resources available as we can access databases of academic journals and news sources. This privilege, combined with other unique services offered by school, make the library an important part of the learning environment we get to be a part of while pursuing a college degree. The Library and the library are both valuable places to go in a college town; the hard part is keeping them from interfering with each other.