Discovered Feelings!

I know that I am restarting to blog with such a strange topic after a long hiatus. Nevertheless, that’s what has been lingering in my mind for the last few days and hence decided to break the ice with my interesting Oxford experiences so far.

As a graduate student of Oxford, I am expected to research in a highly demanding learning environment. This simply translates to unlimited reading and referring of literature from books, journals, articles in print and electronic copies. So, librarians play a vital role for us to do this reading seamlessly. Let me share that their job is not just to stack and sort the books, but to actually bear the torch for us in our darkest reading alleys. Libraries are the second homes for us here and librarians ease the stay with such invaluable assistance.

Libraries at Oxford offer vast collections of print copies that are diligently catalogued, such that we search for the copies through the centralized library portal. By this search, we primarily learn their location, code, and availability. This search can start from a basic query moving to inter- disciplinary, inter-library, open source databases, and many more repositories. Surprisingly, all the librarians are knowledgeable enough to guide us instantly on the type of search query to be used in order to find a particular book. This is especially handy during our essay crisis time, when we relentlessly read through the entire academia in a time-crunching scene.

Furthermore, librarians conduct several workshops to aid the students find the needed learning resource easily. For example, I've attended a session on Search skills that taught us on strategies (science) of searching and setting a direction for building our future bibliographies.

Talking about their subject expertise, as the entire university operates on various departments; the concerned librarians specialize in the related subjects and guide students instantly. For instance, I have met a Life Sciences library, who was affluent about the medical science books and could rant the sources amazingly.
Another interesting dimension is their latest technology inclination, where they strongly endorse about e-books and even introduced a scheme to loan e-book readers in order to promote e-reading.

Each of them is so impressive that you cannot for a second, mistake them to be trivial, since they talk straight sense. In the initial days, I was puzzled when the past students were appreciative of librarians….now I experience what they did!