Are you at a dead end in your research and need help finding sources? Or have you found a citation that you need help accessing? Chat with a Research and Instruction Librarian to get assistance with these and other questions related to succeeding in research.  Librarians are also available via email, phone and in-person at the reference desk on the 1st floor of the UAA/APU Consortium Library.

Can your building handle an earthquake?  Need to know the specs for designing structures in earthquake-prone areas like Alaska?  Find out in one of the Consortium Library’s many full text eBooks available in EngNetBase (CRC), Access Engineering (McGraw-Hill), or Earth & Environmental Science (Springer).  Or try QuickSearch and limit to Books/eBooks to find them all.

It is now possible for UAA students, staff and faculty to print wirelessly from their laptop at the Consortium Library. Simply download the appropriate driver to your laptop and make sure that you have your UAA Wolfcard or copy card to print. For more information please visit the UAA Information Technology Services page.

If you have a project to get started for a class, there are several ways to start. You can ask for help at the reference desk. You can search in QuickSearch on the front page of the Library’s website. There are research guides by subject. Or you can go to the How To Guides under Help with Research.

One of our most common ebook sources is ebrary (which is now owned by ProQuest).  ebrary has just come out with an updated interface after several years of ‘the same old thing,’ and two immediate advantages are, first, (to quote Etta James) At Last! we can read the content by scrolling smoothly through many pages rather than having to use the arrow icons in the menu bar to go back and forth one page at a time!  And second, the only search box in sight searches in the ebook you’re reading; there were two search boxes in the old version and the most prominent search box could get you lost very fast because it searched everything in ebrary rather than just your ebook.

For more search functions, there’s now a search menu at the top of the interface.  The content now appears on the right with the table of contents on the left, and you can still have a user account where you can select your own ‘bookshelf’ of titles and keep notes on the content.  The various functions, such as magnifying the text, seem to work more smoothly than in the older version.  All in all, using the new ebrary interface is a much more pleasant experience than the older version.  By the way, while our titles are available for online reading, they won’t download unless we’ve got a multiple-user license for them; that’s why you’ll often see a ‘Not Available for Download’ message.

I’ve been looking at the Encyclopedia of the Mexican-American War while writing this; going somewhat beyond Mexico, here’s another ebrary example that’s worth searching for in the catalog or QuickSearch:

Atlas of the Galilean Satellites

After the introductory chapters, there’s a fine moon-by-moon display of maps and photographs for Calisto, Ganymede, Europa, and Io.  Enjoy!