Off-Campus Library Services is a unit set up to serve rural UAF students and faculty who do not have access to appropriate information resources in their town or village. We work in support of The College of Rural & Community Development and UAF eLearning and Distance Education.
For Students
We can supply your information needs for the courses you are taking. For example, if a research paper is required in the teleconference or correspondence course that you are taking, you can contact us, explain your information need, and we will send library materials to you so that you can write your paper.
For Faculty
We support your teaching and research needs. We are happy to assist by providing research services and materials that will help in course preparation and faculty-related research, and to provide library instruction via audio conference.
Resources
If you need books, you can browse through the book collection in the Library Catalog. http://catalog.library.uaf.edu/uafandbiosci/
If you need journal articles for your class, try Academic Search Premier, a collection of peer-reviewed articles and academic journals.Once you're logged into the site, be sure to note the "Full Text" and "Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals" options below the search fields.
You may also wish to look at NewsBank Online, a newspaper resource. Select NewsBank Online from the options. http://library.uaf.edu/databases-by-title/
If you are prompted to login to these, or other library resources, a UA email username and password are required. Find your UA username and activate your email account through ELMO. https://elmo.alaska.edu/
For more information contact the UA OIT help Desk at 907-450-8300 (1-800-478-8226 within Alaska). Accounts are available to all UAF students, faculty, and staff free of charge.
What You Can Expect From Us
The Off-Campus Library Services unit is committed to fast, efficient, and accurate responses to the people requesting our service. If you are working on a twenty-page paper, you will receive more material that if you are writing a two-page paper. The type of material you receive (books or photocopies of articles) depends a lot on your topic and what we find when we do the search. If you are not satisfied with what you receive, please let us know. Occasionally a topic will be so obscure or so complex to search that is goes beyond the amount of time that we can allot to it. If this should occur, we will contact you and ask if you have an alternative topic.
What We Expect From You
When you contact us by telephone, we will ask routine questions such as your name, mailing address, telephone and FAX number if you have them, course name, and instructor. We will also ask for your UA ID number so that we can set up a library checkout record for you. (We check out the books to you if we send books).
We will then ask questions about what you need. These questions are especially important if we are doing the searching for you, because we want to search for and send exactly what you need. Before you call, it might be helpful for you to write down a sentence or two description the topic you are working on.
If you contact us by mail, e-mail, or fax, please try to provide information to the questions we would ask you via the phone (mentioned in the previous two paragraphs).
If you reach our answering machine, please leave a message with your name, how and when we can reach you best, and some idea regarding your information need.
Last, but definitely not least, we ask that you contact us as soon as possible with your topic!
~Tyson Rinio - Off-Campus Services librarian