This guide is designed to support your research process.
Seniors who are working on their thesis can request books for the library to purchase. The average amount of books that thesising seniors request is between 3-5 titles. Print titles may take 4-6 weeks to arrive and processed so please request early in the semester. Ebooks can be made available quicker, so you may choose this option if the title is available in electronic form. For those requesting subscriptions or other rarer or specialized materials, please contact your librarian.
All books checked out to Seniors may be checked out until the end of your graduating semester. If a book you need is checked out, you may ask staff at the circulation desk to place a hold on it. If you need it sooner than its due date and it has been on loan for at least two weeks, you may request its recall. You are notified when the book comes in; pickup is at the Circulation desk.
Thesis desks assigned to seniors are for their sole use through the end of the school year or as long as they remain registered for 470. Spring/Fall seniors will need to re-enter the thesis lottery in the fall. Desk do not carry over from spring to fall. Only thesis desks are assigned to individuals. All other seating in the library is open to the Reed Community. You may not claim or reserve these desks. Please take your belongings with you when you leave. Items left on open study desks and tables will be removed and can be retrieved from the circulation desk.
The Thesis Temple Style Guide works well with Zotero. If you begin writing in the thesis template in the beginning, and document your citations in Zotero, it will be relatively smooth to insert your references, footnotes, endnotes into your thesis. The Zotero research guide provides more information.
The thesis templates are pre-made documents in which to write your thesis, so that it is formatted correctly for the Library and Registrar's Office. CUS provides downloadable templates for both Word and LaTeX. We recommend writing your thesis in the template from the beginning.
For in-person help using the thesis templates, drop-in consulting is available any time the CUS Help Desk is open. Or you can email CUS or call at x7525. The sooner you come with questions, the better!
Do you need support around brainstorming, getting research tips, search strategies, database tutorials, book ordering, citation management support, etc? Make an appointment with the Social Sciences librarian! I am willing to meet at Commons, at a coffeeshop, your thesis desk, classroom, my office in the library, or on Zoom. The goal is to get you comfortable with research and feeling confident when writing your thesis.
This work by the Reed College Library is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International License.
Reed College Library | Email: library@reed.edu | Phone: 503-777-7702 | 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202-8199
