| Visit: Circulation Desk, Library Main Floor | |
| Call: 413-662-5321 | |
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| Text: 413-224-6600 | |
| Frequently Asked Questions |
MCLA full- and part-time students, faculty, and staff
Community members, Alumni, Williams College Faculty and Students (see our community borrowers policy for more information)
HELM Library patrons
| MCLA/HELM Students | MCLA/HELM Faculty & Staff | Community Borrowers, Alumni, Williams College Students and Faculty | |
| Circulating Books | 28 day loan; one 14 day renewal | 1 semester (fall/spring/summer) loan; 1 semester renewal | 28 day loan; one 14 day renewal |
| Reserves | In-library use only | In-library use only | Non-circulating |
| Faculty Collection DVDs | In-library use only | 7 days | In-library use only |
| Popular DVDs | 7 days; one 7-day renewal | 7 days; one 7-day renewal | 7 days; one 7-day renewal |
| Laptops/Chargers | 7 days | Non-circulating | Non-circulating |
| DVD Players | 7 days | 7 days | In-library use only |
| Other equipment (chargers, headphones,, etc.) | In-library use only | In-library use only | In-library use only |
| Maximum number of simultaneous checkouts | 50 | 50 | 5 |
Items cannot be renewed if you have any fees on your account.
Check our Interlibrary Loan page for information on how to borrow materials that MCLA does not own.
BEFORE YOU BORROW A LIBRARY LAPTOP, PLEASE BE AWARE OF THE FOLLOWING:
Freel Library strives to create an environment where all patrons are welcomed, respected, and treated equitably. We ask that library patrons join us in this effort.
Library patrons are expected to observe MCLA policies as well as state and federal laws and to behave in a way that maintains an environment conducive to work and study.
Patrons who prefer a quieter study environment are encouraged to study upstairs.
Library staff will speak with patrons whose behavior in a given study area is disrupting others’ ability to work. Library staff reserve the right to determine what constitutes disruptive behavior. Patrons unwilling or unable to observe these policies may be asked to leave the building.
Food and drink are permitted in the library. Please respect custodial and library staff, as well as other library patrons, by cleaning up after yourself and promptly alerting library staff of any spills.
Please approach any member of the library staff if violations of these policies are affecting your ability to use and enjoy library spaces, collections, or services.
Questions and comments about these policies may be directed to the Associate Dean for Library Services.
See also the following MCLA Policies:
Three study rooms are available for student use in Freel Library. These rooms are intended to support collaborative projects and assignments. While other uses are permitted, those who are working together on a group project may receive priority.
All rooms have whiteboards and markers.
Freel Library welcomes donations of academic books and other materials that will add to the scope, depth, and relevance of our collection. Gifts have enabled us to enrich teaching, learning, and the student experience at MCLA.
We evaluate donations similarly to new purchases: items must be relevant to the MCLA curriculum, in good condition, appropriate for academic research, up-to-date in content and format, fit within available library shelf space, and not duplicate existing titles. Librarians responsible for collection development will make the final determination of whether items are appropriate for the collection.
Generally, we do not accept journal or magazine issues, older editions of textbooks, items in poor condition (e.g., highlighted, underlined, torn or yellowed pages, etc.), media in formats not currently supported by the library (e.g., LP, cassette, VHS), and copies of videos or television programs that do not comply with copyright law.
Thank you for considering donating your materials to Freel Library.
Current MCLA faculty, students, and staff and emeritus faculty may request items via MCLA’s interlibrary loan service. Others are encouraged to consult their public library or home institution.
Requests from patrons who have overdue interlibrary loans will not be placed until outstanding items are returned or a renewal is requested/granted by the lending library.
MCLA will request loans of books, DVDs, microforms, and other materials, as well as PDFs of articles and book chapters, that are not available via our own library.
Some items tend not to be available via ILL. These include:
Other items tend to be difficult to obtain via ILL, but we will try. These include:
The library is almost always able to obtain interlibrary loans at no cost to you. In the rare case that we cannot, we will contact you to discuss alternatives.
It depends! In general, books/DVDs take 1-2 weeks to arrive, while articles usually take 1-3 days. However, requests may take longer. If there is a date beyond which the item would no longer be useful for you, you can enter a “Not Needed After” date in the ILL request form. To check on the status of your request, please email ill@mcla.edu.
For books/DVDs: you’ll receive an email letting you know that your items are ready to pick up at Freel Library. (Any items not picked up by their due dates will be returned to their home libraries.)
For PDFs of articles/chapters: You will receive an email with instructions for downloading the PDF, which is yours to keep.
Loan periods for physical items (books, DVDs) are set by the lending library. Most interlibrary loans are for short-term use (2-4 weeks). In rare cases, a lending library might recall a book, which would shorten the original loan period. PDFs of articles and book chapters are yours to keep.
Maybe! Email ill@mcla.edu to request a renewal. We will contact the lending library and let you know whether they agree to a renewal and, if so, what the new due date is.
Depending on overall request volume and staff capacity, the library may limit patrons to five active requests at any given time.
Please try not to be! It is important to respect other libraries’ due dates and policies in order to maintain good relations with our peer institutions who are generous enough to share their collections with us.
Contact the MCLA Library, or stop by during regular business hours. New for Fall 2023: If you currently have items borrowed from other libraries via ILL, they will appear, along with any items borrowed from MCLA, HELM, and/or ComCat, in your MCLA library record, which you can view by logging in to the library catalog.
If we’re unable to fill your request, we will contact you and try to brainstorm other ways for you to get access to the item.
In general, books requested via ILL from other libraries must be picked up in person at Freel Library. MCLA librarians can work with you to explore other strategies for getting access to books that you need if you are not able to come to campus. Exceptions may be made for faculty on sabbatical as long as they can realistically return books to Freel Library by their due dates.
(PDFs of articles and book chapters requested via interlibrary loan are delivered to your MCLA email address, so you can request and receive these wherever you are.)
Please email ill@mcla.edu, stop by during regular business hours, or contact the library using any of the options on our Ask Us page.
(based on ALA Selection & Reconsideration Policy Toolkit)
The mission of Freel Library is to support and sustain MCLA’s unique, diverse, and vibrant academic community by providing equitable access to information; expert and empathetic assistance; and inspiring spaces and programs. The library plays a key role in students’ evolution into scholars; supports ongoing scholarship and lifelong learning throughout the MCLA community; and collaborates with departments and divisions across campus to enrich the academic and cultural life of the college.
Freel Library endorses the principles of intellectual freedom outlined in the Association of College & Research Libraries’ “Intellectual Freedom Principles for Academic Libraries: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights” and “Standards for Libraries in Higher Education.”
The development of Freel Library’s collections is driven by the mission, curriculum, and life of the college, the availability of institutional resources, and the information needs of students, faculty, and staff. The library’s collection development policy:
Many aspects of this collection development policy align neatly with the Five Laws of Library Science articulated by S. R. Ranganathan in 1931 and paraphrased below:
Librarians are qualified by education, training, and experience to select library materials in all formats. Freel Library actively solicits input from the wider community regarding library acquisitions and, subject to budgetary capacity and the selection criteria outlined in this policy, endeavors to build a collection that is responsive to community needs and requests. As the library’s budget administrator, the Associate Dean for Library Services is ultimately responsible for all purchasing decisions.
The following criteria guide the acquisition of new items as well as the acceptance of potential gifts/donations.
Inflation in the cost of scholarly publications routinely outpaces growth in higher education budgets, placing real limits on the library’s ability to acquire new items, especially continuing resources (databases, serials, etc.). All selections must be evaluated carefully against available funds. Costs associated with processing, storing, and maintaining access to resources are also considered when deciding whether to acquire items.
Every person their book.
Every book its reader.
Ranganathan’s Second and Third Laws of Library Science
MCLA is a small, teaching-focused liberal arts college of limited means. The library faces the challenge of building a collection that anticipates needs and provides a breadth and depth of coverage appropriate for the college’s curriculum and community (Ranganathan’s “Every person their book”) while also prioritizing the acquisition of resources for which there is an expressed or evident demand (Ranganathan’s “Every book its reader”). Framed differently, there is a tension between purchasing items “just in case” someone might discover and use them, versus “just in time” to meet an actual, expressed need.
A combination of resource scarcity and increased demands on librarians prevent us from carefully curating a library collection by having librarians regularly peruse and select items from standard review sources on a title-by-title basis. Rather, the library has come to rely upon subscription access to large, multidisciplinary aggregator collections of ebooks,ejournals, and streaming videos to provide broad and general, “just-in-case" coverage across most academic disciplines.
Librarians continue to select individual monographs and films that:
Subject to the selection criteria that follow, the remainder of the book budget is generally devoted to purchasing patron requests and materials required for use in MCLA courses (see G, below).
The library relies heavily upon statewide licenses and consortial package subscriptions to provide access to research databases. Individual databases and licensed digital collections are selected to provide coverage as equitably as possible across all areas of the curriculum within the constraints of the budget.
Almost all of the library’s journal offerings come from subscription packages. Requests for new journal subscriptions generally require the cancellation of an equivalent number of dollars elsewhere in the library’s subscription budget.
When an item is available for acquisition in multiple formats, the format that is most accessible and compatible with the anticipated use case for the item will be selected to the extent that the budget permits (Ranganathan’s “Save the time of the reader”). While the library generally only acquires one copy of any given item, requests for multiple formats of an item will be considered on a case-by-case basis. With the exception of archival or unique local history items, the library will not acquire items in formats that it does not currently support (as of this writing, examples include VHS and vinyl records). Library acquisitions must comply with copyright and fair use guidelines as well as any license terms or terms of service imposed by rightsholders.
Items purchased or licensed with library funds should be available to the entire MCLA community. Resources for the exclusive use of a single class, office, or department should be purchased using funds from the appropriate departmental or office budget.
As the cost of an item increases, so does the importance that it remain useful beyond a short time frame. For items that are more expensive than the average monograph acquisition (~$50), the library will normally not purchase updated editions of the same title more frequently than every four years.
Freel Library strives to ensure that the campus community has access to a broad representation of diverse ideas and voices. The library recognizes that the voices and experiences of minoritized groups are underrepresented in its collections and is committed to working toward correcting this inequity. The library asserts that all ideas, however controversial or repugnant one may consider them, are legitimate targets of scholarly inquiry. While proactively building a collection that presents “all sides” of every issue may be impossible budgetarily and epistemologically, the library does not proscribe, withdraw, or deny access to items based on the ideology of their content or the identities of their authors. Collection development policies like this one seek to remove partisanship from decisions about acquiring or withdrawing items by articulating clear, non-ideological criteria for selection and deselection.
Electronic resources are defined as resources that require computer access. These include but are not limited to electronic serials or collections of serials; online bibliographic or numeric databases; electronic reference materials; electronic monographs or collections of monographs; and streaming media.
Electronic resources considered for addition to the collection should fall within current guidelines as reflected in the MCLA Collection Development Policy and other appropriate guidelines. Traditional selection criteria for library materials apply to electronic resources; however, due to their unique nature, their acquisition is evaluated against a set of additional criteria.
The library is committed to leading and supporting efforts to make access to course materials equitable for all students. At the same time, the library’s current budget does not permit for the routine acquisition of all materials used in all courses. Print copies of traditional textbooks tend to fall outside of the selection criteria outlined in this policy: these items are expensive (criterion a); inconvenient, difficult, and/or impossible for some students to access via the library (criterion c); and typically superseded by updated editions every couple of years (criterion d). Electronic versions of these same textbooks tend not to be available for libraries to license and provide due to publisher terms of use (criterion c). The library routinely reviews course adoptions reported to the bookstore and, budget permitting, purchases those that fall within these selection criteria, prioritizing items available for license under an unlimited simultaneous user access model. The library also encourages and provides support for faculty who wish to incorporate openly-licensed (Open Educational Resources/OER), library-licensed, or other types of no-cost materials into their courses.
The library will attempt to acquire videos requested by instructors for classroom use when these videos are available to the library under perpetual access models (life-of-file site licenses or physical media, e.g., DVDs). Films that are only available as limited duration site licenses typically fall outside the scope of these collection development guidelines. If other funds are available to subsidize limited-term streaming licenses for videos used in instruction, the library can help by identifying license options; working with vendors to acquire licenses and establish access; and charging the appropriate budget lines for licenses.
Items selected by librarians and purchase requests from others in the campus community are reviewed by the Associate Dean of Library Services, who either (a) forwards approved selections to the Technical Services Specialist or Digital Resources Librarian for acquisition or (b) notifies the selector/requestor of the library’s decision not to purchase the item and of any alternative means of access, which may include interlibrary loan or visiting other libraries to use materials on site. Library materials are purchased in accordance with college, state university, and Commonwealth policies and guidelines unless materials are unavailable for access pursuant to those guidelines, in which case the library considers intellectual freedom considerations paramount.
Freel Library’s special collections comprise:
The library actively collects and archives books published by MCLA faculty, books covering the history of North Adams, the Northern Berkshires, and the Mohican people during their time in the Berkshires; the Beacon (student newspaper); College yearbooks; and regularly issued College publications. The Archives accepts and processes deposits of records and papers from campus offices/departments. The Archives is grateful to consider offers of donated items that help document MCLA’s history; donations are accepted subject to condition, relevance, and storage/preservation requirements.
See Gift Policy
As staff capacity permits, the library reviews its physical holdings on an ongoing basis to ensure that collections meet the current curricular, research, and informational needs of the campus community. Materials that no longer meet the needs of the college community may be removed from the collection; a process known as deselection (sometimes called “weeding”). The following criteria are considered when identifying candidates for deselection:
Librarians and library staff may opt to have the library retain any print title flagged for weeding. Whenever possible, faculty from affected subject areas are also invited to review candidates for withdrawal and identify any that they believe should be retained. To the extent possible, candidates for withdrawal are also checked against standard review sources and/or lists of core college library resources.
Withdrawn items may be donated to other libraries, placed on the library’s free books shelf, or recycled.
Subscription-based electronic resources are reviewed and reassessed prior to each year’s renewal deadline renewal. Perpetual license electronic resources are reviewed and reassessed every 10 years.
A library is a growing organism.
Ranganathan’s Fifth Law of Library Science
This policy will be reviewed periodically (at a minimum, every ten years to coincide with institutional reaccreditation, and/or upon any change in library leadership) and updated to reflect current practices, changes in scholarly publishing/formats, and revisions to external policies/statements invoked in this policy.
[separate policy under development; will be submitted to college governance for approval]