The Online Library is vital component for collegiate success in the Information Age. This state-of-the-art facility is linked from every classroom and available 24/7. Designed in part as a teaching facility, the Online Library gives our students advanced skills and support at the cutting edge of modern Web-based research. Its primary role, however, is the provision of electronic resources for research and direct course support. The university’s library thus conveniently orchestrates access to millions of pages of “trusted” resources from the Open Web.  It provides students with their license to thousands of electronic books and runs of over 15,000 professional journals from the Deep Web-costly materials that are vital for college-level work, but unavailable through Google or the other normal Web search engines.

Those new to virtual libraries are given background information on entrance into the Library’s Information Commons. This includes “Getting Started” instructions, a “Troubleshooting” page, and e-mail links to professional librarians and technical support staff. Advanced researchers and returning students concentrate on the remainder of the page and a Resource Grid. This intuitive interface is designed for “one-stop shopping” with four columns that act as dedicated information suites:

• Article Databases connects to ever expanding digital runs of major scholarly journals. These range from the general holdings of EBSCO and ProQuest to specialized collections in criminal justice, current affairs, environmental affairs, intelligence, the law, public health, and even sports business and poetry.

• Books/E-Books offer an Online Catalog for a small land-based collection and some 50,000 thousand current volumes from our own scans and those of Ebrary, NetLibrary, ACLS’s History Book Project, and etcetera. This column also services interlibrary loan requests, as well as holding special pages dedicated to archival repositories, government documents, military libraries, and hundreds of thousands of open access texts.

• Department Study Portals are dedicated research zones that conveniently combine Open and Deep Web resources. These are developed with faculty to tailor to the research needs of each of the university’s fields of study.

• Tutorial Center features a training section on Information Literacy and collegiate writing. It also includes a job center for alumni and selection of our best student papers as study guides.  In addition, the Center provides links to TurnItIn software with its automated plagiarism checker and Smarthinking, which provides students with free individualized tutors.