By Hailey Wood, Staff Writer
The library at USM has free resources for students and faculty that many may not know about, from movies to books, they all are accessible by logging into your USM account, accessing the library website and searching under “databases and guides.”
Elizabeth Bull, a library specialist at Glickman Library and a USM alumna, never got to use these resources as a student. “I finished my undergraduate here last December and I didn’t know any of these existed until I started working here,” she said. “I don’t have my own Netflix, I borrow my friends, so for me these would have been really cool to know because I definitely would have used them more often.”
Academic Video Online Premium (AVON) is a resource that includes documentaries, movies, interviews, news programs and much more.
On Ancestry Library, some of the services that would normally run for $100 or more to find out more about your family heritage, can be accessed for free through the USM databases. “When you’re in college you can’t shell out that kind of money just to do a little research on your family,” Bull said. Though not exactly like Ancestry.com, it’s an alternative for people who want to save money when looking into their family or other projects.
Films on Demand is a resource for documentaries that you wouldn’t find on Netflix or other paid streaming sites. It’s, “stuff you don’t see on Netflix,” Bull explained. “A lot of things that you see on PBS too, that are older and harder to find.”
Digital Theatre Plus is another service for entertainment. It streams video of British theatre production, such as plays by Shakespeare. You can find this resource by searching “Digital Theatre Plus” in the database search.
Cloud Library has non academic audiobooks and ebooks that are free and can be accessed from a phone, tablet or computer. When you reach the page click login and when prompted to enter your library card ID, enter the black numbers underneath the barcode on your student ID.
Another useful resource Bull mentioned was Flickr for photographs, specifically the Commons, a public photography archive.
“Say you needed to use certain pictures for a project or something, or you were just curious, ‘I wonder what pictures there are about this’ and you wanted to use it somewhere, the commons is cool because its public,” said Bull.
USM students can also use their USM ID card to checkout books, audiobooks, and movies at the Baxter Memorial Library, which is only a five to seven minute walk from the Gorham campus. Your ID must have been activated for library use. If you’ve ever checked out a book, your card is activated. If you have any questions you can ask a librarian to check for you.
There is a wide variety of resources made available through the library. Outside of movies, documentaries and books there are resources for hobbies and crafts through the Hobbies & Crafts Reference Center, music through Maine Music Box, Naxos Music Library and Open Music Library and book reviews through NovelList Plus.