After 33 years as the prototype university without walls, it became apparent in 1997 that the Union Institute, a national university headquartered at Cincinnati, Ohio, needed an appropriate "library without walls" to serve its dispersed student and faculty bodies.
To meet the need, I designed and implemented an entirely online academic research facility as part of the university's web site. The resulting "library" has served our undergraduate and graduate adult students, now about 3,000 FTE, for nearly five years.
An evaluation of the needs of our non-resident adult students who learn at a distance revealed a strong requirement for access to scholarly documents and academic research tools. Undergraduate students needed to be able to conduct research for their term papers and capstone senior projects. Graduate students needed to conduct extensive literature searches and deep data and content research for their dissertations.
As I began building the virtual facility in 1997, it was a time when the general public was becoming familiar with search engines on the Web so I composed the easy-to-remember name Research Engine for our academic library online. It would have two important parts:
First, a portal on the university's web site would offer a gateway to myriad resources on the web that would be of use to academic researchers.Second, an entrance point would be established to those commercial academic research databases the university would offer at no extra cost to students and faculty.
I organized the Research Engine by discipline. Academia was divided arbitrarily into fifty scholarly disciplines and multidisciplinary fields of study. Those divisions were subdivided into fields of study and areas of inquiry. As authoritative resources were located and reviewed for content useful to academic pursuits, links were placed under relevant disciplines in the Research Engine. Those links are open to all, not just enrolled students.
Then I arranged for services from publishers of electronic databases. Most notable was the OCLC FirstSearch collection of nearly sixty databases. For budgetary considerations, we ensure ready access by password only to our students and faculty. Students use Web browsers to access FirstSearch from anywhere.
Some databases accessed from the Research Engine don't require passwords. For instance, a valuable database open to everyone without password is Medline. The practical difference for a student interested in searching Medline is in full-text. The student has to pay for full-text documents when going directly to Medline. If our student enters Medline through the FirstSearch service we provide, the university absorbs the fee.
The Research Engine has a "Reference Desk" with online access to library catalogs, dictionaries, thesaurus, quotations, encyclopedias, almanacs, glossaries, bibliographies, catalogs, public domain book texts, museums, governments, universities, calendars, sourcebooks, directories, our own dissertations and senior projects, mass media, Web search engines, and others of use in an academic program.
The Reference Desk provides helpful tutorials on searching techniques, academic research methods and how to write papers. There are resources on online privacy and online education. The Reference Desk is open to all without password.
The Research Engine has received high marks from the students during its nearly five years of use. It is available at http://www.tui.edu/Research/Research.html.