Elisabeth S. Blissell Library   Penn State New Kensington

We can help you with your personal research by finding information for you, suggesting places to search, and requesting books and articles for you. Just e-mail aer123@psu.edu or call 724-334-6072 and let us know what you need.

Although we are a physically small library, we can obtain nearly anything for you because of our vast interlibrary loan network. For articles, you can either provide us with the citation and have library staff request it for you, or you can use ILLIAD, a self-service desktop document delivery system. If you use ILLIAD, your article will be mounted on the web so you can access it from anywhere. Before you request an article, first check to see if it is available on-line in one of Penn State's databases using Citation Linker.

To request books from other libraries in the Penn State system, use the "I Want It" button in the CAT. To request books from outside the Penn State system, use the ILL button in Worldcat, located under W on the Databases by Title List. You have to be registered in ILLIAD before you can do this. 

We offer instruction sessions by faculty request to help your students do the research required for their assignments and take full advantage of the resources available to them as Penn State students. All classes are tailored according to the individual class needs, but examples of topics covered are as follows:

• How to find books in the CAT and how to order books from other campuses
• How to find articles in Proquest (a general topic, full-text database)
• How to use a specific database (e.g. Social Science Abstracts, Biological Abstracts)
• How to evaluate information found on the web
• Specific parts of our reference collection (such as the business reference section)
• Information sources for a particular topic (career information, etc.)

Instruction sessions can be held in your regular classroom, in the library, or in a classroom in the computer center. We prefer that the instruction session be relevant to a particular assignment that your students have to complete, so that they can apply what they learn immediately in a practical way. This also allows us to select the most appropriate information sources to cover.

Sign-up for a session by calling 724-334-6072 or e-mailing aer123@psu.edu. 

We can put print copies of anything you want on reserve so that your students have access to them all the hours the library is open. For 24-hour access, consider putting your materials on electronic reserve. Electronic reserves are accessed via the CAT or your ANGEL course space and can be downloaded or printed by your students any time, anywhere.You give us the material, (or even just the citations) and we will do all the work involved in getting them on the Web. (Copyright restriction, as always, may apply.) Contact Yesenia Figueroa at yuf3@psu.edu with your reserve requests.

We need your help! No one knows better than you do what materials your students might need to support their coursework. Please let us know of any books or other materials you think the library should buy to support instruction in your field. We're also happy to buy materials that are of personal interest as well, within reason.

The Penn State Teaching and Learning with Technology website has lots of resources for learning about and dealing with cyberplagiarism. Click here. 

Published something recently? Won an award? Got tenure or a promotion? Please let us know. We have a Faculty Publications Page on our website and an exhibit case in the main hallway where we display copies of recent articles or other materials published by our faculty, and celebrate other faculty achievements. It lets students and others know what we're up to.