Q. Which books and other materials are in the Library Annex?

All books acquired by the Library since 2007, regardless of publication date, and all books that have circulated at least once since 2001 are kept on campus in the Mary Couts Burnett Library building. All bound journals are offsite at the Library Annex. Multi-volume sets are not broken up. The intent is to locate all newly purchased material onsite, and continue keeping new material onsite while shifting older material to the Library Annex. All digital material continues to be fully accessible from the library’s website.

The scholarly literature of some departments is primarily in digital format. The change in storage location does not present the same difficulties for those departments as it does for departments whose academic literature is primarily book-based. Departments with larger book collections have larger collections in the main library building; also departments with higher circulation patterns--either through formal check-out or through re-shelving after in-house use--have more material retained in the main library building.

The location of materials is relatively permanent. However, some courses taught at TCU may need a subset of the collection stored in the Library Annex to be brought back to the Mary Couts Burnett Library. When this occurs, library staff work with faculty to bring the volumes needed for the given time period back to the Library building. Likewise, faculty hired in the future may have a need for selected subject areas that are not stored onsite; staff will try to accommodate this when requested.