New User's Guide  

Welcome to our Library! Here in our library you will find a wealth of information to support your scholarly efforts here at Cal Poly. We hope you will take a few minutes to go through this guide and learn some of the basics of using our library.

Your Bronco Access Card is your library card: you will need it to check out books, enter the 24 hour computer lab and some of the study rooms. You should also obtain a library password (sometimes called a PIN), which you can create remotely. This PIN/Password allows you to use the Self Check Out Machines to check out books, and most importantly, the PIN/Password allows you to access our databases and electronic journals from home. Look at our about remote access instructions page for more details about this process.

You can familiarize yourself with our building by looking at our floor maps; also, there are a lot of FAQ pages about how to get to places in library. You can see upcoming events here in the Library Calendar or by looking in the spotlight section of our Home Page. Here are our Library Hours. In our building, we have photocopying and printing, scanning, study spaces and study rooms, which you can now reserve online, as well as computer workstations, including a 24 hour computer lab. We also have a computer reservation system for most of the first floor computer workstations.  In our front lobby, we have a Starbucks. Like many other buildings on campus, we have wireless access.

To look for books, look in our Library Catalog; to find articles, look in our Databases pages. To find out what we have available electronically, look at our Electronic Journals list and see our FAQ items on Ebooks. To get things we don't have in the Library, request materials via our Get Materials Our Library Doesn't Own page. We also have a mobile version of our website.

We also have specialty subject guides. And you can contact your subject librarian. To learn about basic library research methods, see our video tutorials. Follow us on Facebook or keep up with us with Twitter. We also have a library glossary.

If you still have questions, take a look at our FAQ - we may have answered your question already. If not, you can leave a question in the FAQ, call us (909.869.3074), or come into the Library.

Things to bring with you if you come to the library:

Paper and pen or pencil. Dollar bills to pay for printing using the Pharos printing system, or have your Bronco Card loaded with some BroncoBucks to pay for photocopying and printing (The Library has no change and nothing in the library accepts coins). USB compatible storage device (flash drive) for storing work or downloaded items or use a cloud storage provider. Your Bronconame and BroncoPassword; you can use our workstations to the best advantage if you use your bronco identity.