University Libraries

By Maureen Schlangen

When electrical engineering doctoral candidate Barath Narayanan arrived at UD in his senior undergraduate year as part of a dual bachelor’s-master’s program with SRM University in Chennai, India, he learned quickly that he could rely on Roesch Library to help him find the materials and information he needed to succeed.

“The first person I met in the Library was Jack O’Gorman,” said Narayanan, whose doctoral dissertation will address biomedical image processing to aid radiologists in the detection of lung nodules that a human eye can miss on a chest x-ray. His master's thesis involved the application of super resolution for JPEG2000 compressed images used in airborne imaging.

“At first, I just needed to know the most current discoveries in my area of research, so he helped me with searching for those,” he said. “I also need reference books for things I’m learning in my classes. A professor has to cover a lot of topics, and you can only cover so much in 75 minutes’ time. If we don’t have one that I need here in the Library, it’s almost always available through OhioLINK.”

O’Gorman, a research and instruction librarian and the Library’s liaison to the School of Engineering, said students are often surprised at the access they have to the latest research: Roesch Library has more than 1 million print and electronic books, subscribes to more than 200 databases, and provides access to more than 68,000 print and electronic journals.

These are valuable resources, Narayanan said, but just as valuable to him have been the librarians and Knowledge Hub staff who contributed to Narayanan’s success in landing two summer graduate fellowships and a publication in a European journal.

“I read a lot of articles in the Library on how to write proposals,” he said, “and I also got valuable references that I needed to mention in regard to my research.”

The Library also came through for him when his computer crashed early in his Ph.D. program. For two whole semesters, he completed almost all of his work on the Library’s shared-access computers.

“And I use the study rooms very often,” he said. “They are a good place to study and work with focus.”