Jan 14, 2009: Alumni Ability to Use Library Resources

I am [listed degree/area of study] student at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville working on my dissertation. During my literature search, I discovered Ejournals in your library that are not available at UTK. These journals relate specifically to my disseration subject. As a past student at VT, would it be possible to gain access to your library material? If there is a reasonable fee for access, I would be willing to pay this fee. (I received [degrees] ... from VT)

Sorry to say that there is no mechanism to provide remote access to restricted resources like databases and electronic journals to anyone other than currently enrolled students and currently employed faculty and staff. This is pretty typical with academic libraries. Alumni are normally expressly restricted from enjoying remote access in our contractual arrangements with publishers and online vendors.

On the plus side, however, you can physically walk into Newman Library and access the resources you want to see. There are no contractual restrictions on walk-in business and this library does not have the sort of password or ID access to electronic resources that you often see in private institutions. This is a land-grant school, so we try to be open to everyone – within our contractual obligations.

The library has good hours during the semester (101.5 hours). You might consider coming here some weekend. The library is open 9:00 am to 8:00 pm on Saturdays and noon to midnight on Sundays.

Blacksburg has considerably more hotel options now than you saw [when you were here]. If you are collecting hotel points, let me know which chains and I can send you some information about possibilities.

Your other option is to request the articles you need through the UTK interlibrary loan service. This assumes you have a list of known items or could derive one.

Dave Beagle, Reference Librarian