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 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 is the provision of electronic resources for research and classroom use. The university’s library thus orchestrates access to millions of pages of “trusted” resources from the Open Web.  Equally important, the facility provides students with their license to electronic books and professional journals from the Deep Web-costly materials that are vital for college-level work, but unavailable directly through Google or the other normal Web search engines.

Those new to virtual libraries are given background information on entrance into the Online Library. This includes “Getting Started” instructions, “About the Library” details, a “Troubleshooting” page, and e-mail links to professional librarians. An adjacent section provides news on recent additions, trials, and problem alerts. 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.”  Its four columns act as dedicated information suites:

• Article Databases connects to expanding digital runs with over 17,000 scholarly journals. The latter range from the general holdings from EBSCO and ProQuest to specialized collections in criminal justice, current/international affairs, environmental matters, intelligence, the law, public health, psychology, and even sports business and poetry.
  
  
• Books/E-Books offer an Online Catalog a small land-based collection and more than 70,000 electronic volumes from Ebrary, NetLibrary, and ACLS’s History Book Project-as well as our own scans and AMU Press output. This column also services interlibrary loan requests, as well as special pages dedicated to archival repositories, government documents, military libraries, and hundreds of thousands of open access texts.
  
  
• Department Study Portals are dedicated research launch zones. Conveniently combining Open and Deep Web resources, these portals are developed with faculty and tailored to the specific needs of each of the university’s fields of study.
  
  
• Tutorial Center features a training section on Information Literacy and collegiate writing. It includes a selection of our best student papers as study guides. You will find a dedicated Career Library and resume assistance.  In addition, the Center provides links to MyDropBox software with its automated plagiarism checker and, especially, Smarthinking, which provides students with free access to individual tutors.