Reserves in the Library

Library Reserves are books and other materials that are kept behind the Service Desk for use by students in the Library. These items cannot be checked out, but they can be signed out for use in the Library for up to two hours at a time.

NHTI faculty often request that specific items be placed on reserve in order that they be available to all the students in a particular class, or course of study. By temporarily restricting them to Library Use Only, they ensure that the items will not be checked out for our usual 21-day period by one student, and thus be unavailable for everybody else.

Reserve items may be from the Library’s own collection, or they may belong to a specific department or faculty member. They may be books, models, pre-printed articles, flash cards, DVDs, or other materials.

To use a Reserve item, just present your NHTI student ID (or other acceptable ID) to the person at the Service Desk and ask for the item you need. The Library staff member will find your item, take your ID and ask you to write your name on the item’s sign-out form. You are now free to use the item within the Learning Commons area for two-hours. If there are specific parts of the item that are assigned, you may want to use the Library scanner to send those pages to your e-mail or to a flash drive for later study.

When you are finished, just return the item to the Service Desk and retrieve your ID.

The only exception to the rule of keeping Reserves in the Library are items marked Overnight Use Only. These are items such as DVDs/Blu-rays, ancillary readings, flash cards or other material that your professor feels could be better studied at home or in the residence hall. These items are signed-out the same as any other, but must be returned the next day that the Library is open. This ensures that the material is available for another student as soon as possible.

We at the Library try our best to share out Reserve items on a fair and equitable basis. There may be times when we can extend the two-hour limit and allow you more time to use them. At other times, the material is needed for an upcoming exam and every student in the class needs access, so we may be stricter in observing the time limit, for obvious reasons.

As always, the Library staff is your friendly source of information about Reserves as well as all our other resources. Come by and get to know us.