Join our mailing list!
©2007
StudentAffairs.com
All Rights Reserved
|
Building an Academic Research Library Online
Anthony R.
Curtis, Ph.D.
Associate Dean for Academic Information Services
The Union Institute
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.
Printer
Friendly Version
|
|
