Reference Desk Staffing & Peak Times

The Information Center is staffed as follows:

Sunday: 12p.m.-8 p.m. librarian, 8 p.m.-2a.m. student assistants.

Monday - Thursday: 7:30 a.m. -9 p.m. staff and librarians, 9 p.m.-2 a.m. student assistants.

Friday: 7:30 a.m.-5 p.m. librarians and staff, 5-6 p.m. student assistants.

Saturday: 10 a.m.-6:00 p.m. staff.

Peak Times

While librarians prefer to give instruction customized to your classes, you may also bring your classes in and teach them yourselves. Please call Brett Spencer at (205) 348-1200 at least five days ahead. This helps us avoid several classes coming in at once and gives us time to find additional helpers. You must call ahead to bring a class in at night, since our staffing during the evenings is limited.

In general, during the semester, we are most busy Sunday-Thursday roughly from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m. Computer availabilty varies greatly depending on the time in the semester. This is one reason why we request that you call ahead.

Fall is a particularly busy time in the Libraries. Our computers are often occupied around paper-time, mid-terms, and finals. We strongly recommend that you not bring unscheduled classes to the library at these times. Instead, please arrange a class with a librarian. [1] We have additional areas that can be utilized for instruction, but are generally off-limits to the public.

The best times to bring your classes in are at the point-of-need (usually just before beginning an assignment which requires library research). When working on a term paper or project, students seem to benefit most from (and retain best) library instruction that is specifically tailored to that assignment. We ask that you bring your classes in for a session within a reasonable amount of time before the assignment is due. For upper-level class assignments that require in-depth research and interlibrary loan, we recommend one and a half to two months lead time. If the assignment requires only a few journal articles and books, then two weeks ahead is plenty.