Library Looking up material for a research paper in a l

Library
   Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to our library. I believe Mr. Howard have shown you the different reading rooms on the first and second floors. This room in which you are now standing is the lending and catalogue room. Behind the counter is the open stacks. The door at the far end of the open stacks leads to the closed stacks. Now I’d like to introduce to you how to make use of the references and books here for your study and research. There are also certain rules on borrowing books that I need to explain to you.
   College libraries are designed primarily for research and study. To illustrate its use, let us choose a research topic and follow the step-by-step procedure of looking up the material for the paper. Let’s suppose your assignment is to write a paper on a novel called "The Sun Also Rises" by American writer Ernest Hemingway. The initial step is to go to the main catalog over there. You may notice that the many small drawers on those large wooden cabinets arc lined up in alphabetical order. Each of the drawers contains hundreds of alphabetically sequenced cards. These cards are printed references to all materials available in the library. Each publication is indexed in 3 ways: by subject, by author (family name comes first), and by title. Title cards are cataloged by the first word of the book title, omitting the articles like "a", "an", and "the".
   Then, you look up "Hemingway, Ernest" in the subject index. Following this head, you will be able to see cards of all the books by him, including the book "The Sun Also Rises". You can also see another set of Hemingway material with cards that list books about him, including biographies and literary criticism of his works. But if you want to do some research on a writer who is not as famous as Hemingway, you probably could not find the heading by his name in the subject index. In that case, you just look him up in the author index, which is stored in the cabinet on the right. And if you only know the name of the book, you can use the title index on the left. Remember that for the book "The Sun Also Rises", the first word on the card is "sun", so you should look for the drawers for the letter "s".
   And then you get the cards for the books you need. On the upper left corner of each card is the call number. This is the numerical code that indicates where the book is located in the library. Like most libraries, our library has open and closed stacks. If your book is on the open stacks, you can go to the open stack room, and according to the call number find it by yourself. It’s very easy, because all the books are arranged and shelved by call number. But you know we have only about 30,000 books on open stacks, while most of the
800,000 books in our library are kept in closed stacks. More often than not, the books you need could only be found in the closed stacks which are accessible only to teachers and graduate students. For undergraduates like you, borrowing books from the closed stacks has to be done with the help of our library staff. In that case, you must fill out a call slip for the book, indicating the call number, author and title. You can obtain call slips on tables near the catalog cabinets. You present your call slip together with your library card to a librarian at the circulation desk. He or she will help you check the book out from the closed stacks. The librarian will charge the book to your card through an electronic device. The device can read the bar codes on your card and on the book and transfer the information to a computer for storage. It is easy and fast, saving the time and trouble of filling forms and. stampings. But it is also very strict and impersonal. The borrowing period for each book is one month. If you have not finished your book by the due date, you may request a renewal. You will have to take the book back with you. If no one else has requested the book, the book will be charged to your card again for another loan period. If you failed to return the book by the due date without asking for a renewal, you would have to pay a fine. For one book you would have to pay 10 cents for one day overdue. So make sure to keep the 1 month time limit in mind.