On the second floor, you’ll find books on the history of fossils and
paleontology—what Mariana jokingly refers to as “my shelf.” “I would go
and start browsing the shelves, not just searching the catalog and
databases,” Mariana explained. “Sometimes you don’t know what you’re
looking for until you see it there on the shelf.”
As she worked on her dissertation, she would have half the books on a
given shelf checked out at any given time. It got to the point where
her husband knew exactly where and why to find her when she called for a
ride—she had too many books to carry.
With a bevy of resources close by, the Graduate Student Research Room
on the first floor—exclusively accessible to graduate students—quickly
became Mariana’s go-to spot for writing. “It was very quiet, so I could
focus and write,” Mariana described. “Whether you need to do a
presentation, prepare for a class you need to teach or submit a paper,
we’re all there doing the same thing. You feel that camaraderie.”
The space also strengthened the sense of solidarity with fellow
candidates in her program. The small doctoral program has no office or
common room for classmates to connect or collaborate, so the room served
as this makeshift common area for Mariana and, specifically, one of her
classmates. “A lot of the times I knew if I was going to be there, she
was going to be there,” she said. “So we would share a table and
sometimes [get coffee] together. It was really nice.”
As a fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History for
three years, Mariana honed her research skills—gaining insight on
everything from microscope slides to adhesives used on barcodes for
various specimens. When in need of answers, she always knew where she
could turn to.
“There were very few cases where UD did not have access to what I was
interested in,” Mariana said. “If I needed something, I went online and
checked if the paper was part of papers I could download—and it was
always the case.”
In the instances when a resource wasn’t within the Library’s
collection, she immediately turned to the Interlibrary Loan (ILL)
service, knowing the Library would find it at another institution for
her. In fact, ILL made it possible to have a true full-circle moment:
receiving a book written by the founder of the first library in Uruguay.
Edited into a book, the book was a diary of the man’s travels through
Uruguay, including important history snippets Mariana wanted to read.
“It was amazing,” Mariana noted. “Having all of those resources just a
few clicks or steps away was just amazing. I’m so thankful.”
As a frequent and loyal Library user, it was natural for her to
promote the breadth of the Library’s resources available to the students
in the undergraduate classes she instructed. Many of her students had
to do research on objects—her first piece of advice for them: check the
library.
Particularly with her freshman and sophomore students, she would set
aside time to research during class and walk them through a visit to the
Library website. “I would sit next to them and have them search,” she
explained, laughing as she remembered encouraging them to go straight to
the library after class to get the physical book.
