School Experience Centre

As with the material in the Main Library all items in the SEC are on the Library Catalogue and are shelved by subject eg all resources on the Victorians can be found at 941.081. The location given will be the School Experience Centre, and each item will have a blue piece of tape on the spine to distinguish it . If you wish to find items JUST from the School Experience Centre you can restrict your search on the Library Catalogue by limiting your search to 'School Experience Centre'. The catalogue entry will also tell you which of the following formats to look in:

• SEC Children's Book
• SEC Children's Big Book
• SEC Poster
• SEC CD-ROM
• SEC CD
• SEC Resource Pack
• SEC Maths equipment
• SEC Reference
• SEC Artefact (kept in the stack please ask a member of library staff to get this for you)

• Fiction
• Non - fiction
• Picture books
• Big books
• Pupil and teacher textbooks
• Reference collection - including reading and maths schemes, and other photocopiable resources.

• DVDs
• CDs and Cassettes
• CD-ROMs
• Artefacts
• Resource packs
• Posters/illustrations
• Games and Musical Instruments
• Equipment - including maths and science equipment

The Library journal collection includes a number of titles of relevance to student teachers offering up to date information on practical and theoretical issues. All our holdings can be found on the library catalogue by searching by title or keyword, and restricting the Collection to 'Electronic & Printed Journals Catalogue'. This will indicate whether a print and/or electronic version is available. All print journals are reference only and are kept in the Main Library on the ground floor. Articles from journals may be photocopied. Some useful titles are listed below:

Child Education and Child Education Topics
Junior Education and Junior Education Topics
Primary Geographer
Primary History

We have multiple copies of some picture books and junior fiction and it is possible to borrow more than one copy of an item to take into school if required. Sometimes there are Big Book versions of the same text also available to borrow.

We have a growing collection of both wordless picture books and dual language texts available to borrow. You can find these by searching the Library Catalogue by keywords wordless picture books or dual language.

Most of the loanable material in the SEC can be borrowed for six weeks. One week loan items have an additional piece of yellow tape on the spine and reference books a piece of red tape. Reference books cannot be borrowed, but some titles may also have a duplicate loan copy so please always check the Catalogue. The Catalogue entry will indicate how many copies there are, which ones are reference or loan copies and how long the loan periods are. Education students may borrow 20 items at a time from this collection in addition to 15 items from the main library. Other users may borrow up to 5 items from the SEC, in addition to their normal loan allocation.

Seating is arranged so that groups can sit together and discuss project work. There are two bookable group study rooms which have PCs with interactive whiteboards. These can be booked at the main Library counter. There is also a network of thirteen networked computers. A machine for  printing/scanning/photocopying in black and white and colour is located outside Group Study room 2. The DVD collection is housed outside this room and a machine for previewing DVDs is located next to the Catalogue machines.

Your Subject Librarian with responsibility for the School Experience Centre is Ruth Dryden. Ruth can be contacted on 01865 488220 at Harcourt Hill Library or by email at educationlibrarians@brookes.ac.uk