Library research

If you're like me, you spend hours at your local library wishing there were just a few more books on the botany of some deep dark jungle so you can poison your adventurer heroine and have the brainy (but attractive) research scientist save her with his latest discovery.

Although research is the core of work at colleges and universities, it never occurred to me that I could use them for my personal research until I returned to school at Kent State.

Kent's collection is well over a million volumes, and where I once scrounge my local library's shelves for books on English history, there are hundreds here -- some of them long out of print -- and if I took one out today I woudn't have to return it until September, 2009!

And in Ohio, the university libraries can share materials through a program called OhioLink, so my borrowing privleges at Kent mean the materials from every member college and university are available to me too.

As near as I can determine, anyone can come in and use the library's materials on the premises. But Kent also has a community borrower program where, for a $30 annual fee, anyone over the age of 16 can borrow their materials too. There are rules, of course, and, under some circumstances the fee can be waived.

If you have a college or university in your community it might be worth a phone call to see if they have a policy to allow borrowing privileges to outsiders. Or check with your alma mater. It's quite possible that, as a former student, their materials (and access to the materials of other institutions) are available to you.