Learning Commons
The Learning Commons provides an ideal venue for individual and group study with extensive technology-enabled collaborative learning spaces and with diverse types and groupings of furniture to accommodate a wide variety of learning styles. The Learning Commons is a campus hub that also houses an expanded University Archives; the Center for Teaching and Transformational Learning; an Entrepreneurial Launch Pad; the Center for Communication Arts, including video editing and animation suites, a television studio, and the campus radio station; and the Department of Information Technology (IT) help desk and IT public service staff.
The extensive electronic and print holdings of the Marywood University Learning Commons include more than 410,000 books, e-books, and bound periodicals and access to more than 40,000 distinct journals. The Library website, www.marywood.edu/library, is the place to begin using the Library Services online. It provides links to all types of information, including access to databases, electronic journals and newspapers, electronic books, research guides, research assistance, and many types of information and services.
The library provides access to over 48 subject-specific indexing/abstracting databases, including Psycinfo, Business Source Elite, ArtStor, ERIC, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, the MLA International Bibliography, and Social Work Abstracts, as well as multi-disciplinary full-text databases such as EBSCO Host’s Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, Mergent, Web of Knowledge, and Wiley Online Library. The Learning Commons is fully integrated into the campus voice, data, and wireless network, and off-campus access is also available for most databases. Other resources available 24/7 from the webpage include interlibrary loan, electronic reserves, and reference assistance.
Marywood University is a member of the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc. (PALCI), an academic library consortium with over 75 member institutions. Through PALCI’s RapidLL Interlibrary loan initiative, students and faculty can have digitized articles delivered directly to their email boxes, usually within a few hours of placing a request online. Through PALCI’s E-ZBorrow service, the monograph holdings of many academic libraries in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and West Virginia are easily accessible for borrowing by Marywood students and faculty.
The Learning Commons offers numerous introductory workshops to the various databases and the online catalog. At faculty request, librarians present course-integrated information literacy sessions. Traditional reference assistance is available during regular library service hours. In-depth research consultation is available upon request.