Borrowing

Whilst on placement or work experience many students find themselves pressed for time and often fit in library visits in the evenings or at weekends. It’s therefore useful to remind yourself of our opening hours.

It’s easy to check your library account whilst on placement: there are instructions here.  You will be able to monitor what you have on loan and view the status of any book requests you've made.

It's important to check your university email account regularly whilst on placement, or set up auto-forwarding to your personal account; messages from the Library are always sent to your BGU email address.

If during your placement or work experience you will be living some distance away from Lincoln it’s worth checking if you can use other libraries more local to you.  

We are often contacted by students on longer placements or periods of work experience who are unable to return their loans because they are living and/or working some distance away.  

We strongly advise, before borrowing library resources, that you therefore consider if and how you will be able to return loans if they are requested by other borrowers, particularly items such as one week loans. 

With the exception of Storysacks®, which cannot be borrowed, and DVDs and artefact boxes, which can be borrowed for 3 weeks at a time, all of the children's resources in the Teaching Resources Collection can be borrowed for up to 12 weeks at a time. This extended loan period, available to all BGU students, is specifically designed to assist trainee teachers wishing to take the resources into schools during teaching placements.

To ensure you use your time effectively it can be a good idea to plan library visits ahead of time.  For example, by using WorldCat to:

• Identify items you want to see, and print off a list.  
• Check loan categories (reference, standard loan, one week loan) in case they have any bearing on your visit.  For example, if an item is on reference you may need to allow time to consult it.  
• Check the location and shelfmark of the items so you know where to head for.  
• Check to see if any of the items you want are available as e-books or pdf documents and can therefore be viewed from home.

Online resources are particularly useful when on placement or work experience because they can be accessed anywhere at any time of the day. 

For more about WorldCat, including accessing resources off campus, see our All About WorldCat LibGuide.

For more about online resources see our Online Resources LibGuide, or the subject LibGuide relevant to your course (go to the LibGuides homepage and look for Guides by Academic Subject).

If you can’t get to the Library to access a book or journal (at any time, not only when you're on placement or work experience) we can scan an excerpt and email it to you.  Copyright law permits us to scan and email no more than one chapter per book (or 10% – whichever is larger) and one article per journal issue.   Find out more about scanning here.