Patrons status 1) influences how long a book can be checked out 2) determines what services are available. Students can check out a book for four weeks, and faculty for three months. Library staff may keep a book for an entire year. Any checkable library resource may be renewed as long as no other patron has requested it. Faculty and library staff can place a book on reserve for the period of one semester, or they may bring in foreign resources (books, papers, disks, music CDs, magazines, or tapes that do not belong to the library) and put them on reserve.
Library must also manage a large selection of weekly, monthly, and quarterly magazines, which may not be checked out but are available as reference materials. These magazines are annually bound into volumes or recorded as microfiche. Additional activities of the library staff include re-shelving books, renewing magazine subscriptions, and ordering new library resources.
Library staff also provide a number of other services supporting activities in the research community and for the general public.Two dozen computers are scattered throughout the library. These computers provide access to a variety of databases and indexes as well as to the Internet via up-to-date web-browsing software. Designated library staff are also available to assist patrons with their research needs using these computer based tools as well as standard hard-copy indexes. The library must also connect to the holdings of other libraries so that interlibrary loan requests can be fulfilled. A subset of these libraries allow patrons to directly browse their selections.
A final responsibility of the library staff is the acquisition and retirement of books in the collection. In acquiring new books, a balance between meeting the requests of patrons and achieving a representative breadth in the collections is sought. Books are retired when their content is deemed to be out of date and of no historical value. Ideally, when a book is out of date, it will not be retired until a more up-to-date resource has replaced it in the library's collection