Liberty University Online Student Library Services

Services

The library staff aspires to meet the information needs of our customers. We want to help you become a self-sufficient library user so that you can readily find the materials you need on any occasion.

• There is a full-time Liberty Online Librarian available weekdays by phone or email.
• During evening and weekend hours, you may also contact our Customer Service Center. The staff there will help you select the appropriate databases to use for your topic and show you how to develop searches.
• We won’t do your research for you, but our staff will gladly help you learn how to retrieve sources on a particular topic or from a bibliography.
• For assistance in the process of writing your papers and citing your resources, contact the Online Writing Center. Many of our library databases provide suggested citations, but the library does not provide assistance in writing or editing papers.
• A variety of tutorials and guides are also available online to aid you.

Resources

The ILRC provides books, journal articles, and other resources needed for research in your online courses. In order to access the databases containing these resources, you will need to log into EZProxy using your Liberty username and password.

• The Summon discovery tool is a good place to begin. This tool conducts a broad search of all our databases as well as our library catalog. If you desire, these searches can be limited to items that are available online.
• If you are looking for a specific journal article for which you already have the citation, Journal Finder will allow you to search by journal title to see if we have the issue you need. If we have it, Journal Finder will tell you where it can be accessed.
• Our library’s book and article databases are listed by subject area and also alphabetically by the name of the database. Many articles can be read fully online, but if the article you desire is not available in that format, it can usually be obtained from our print journal collection or from other libraries through ILLiad, the interlibrary loan service. There is no charge for articles when requested through ILLiad. Besides online journals and books, we also have other specialty databases containing industry data, test reviews, literary criticism, reference books, historical books and newspapers, streaming video and audio, etc.
• If you are looking for a particular book title, LUCAS (the library catalog) lists our print and our growing number of ebooks. Imbedded in LUCAS, Google Books gives preview access to a substantial portion of many books. Many of our print books can be sent to you to borrow for the cost of shipping and return postage by requesting them through ILLiad. Because of time constraints, we will not borrow books from other libraries (interlibrary loan) for online students. But if you are in the Lynchburg area taking online courses, you can request interlibrary loan materials to be picked up on campus.
• If the library does not own the book you need, check on WorldCat to see if it is available at a library near you. WorldCat checks this availability when you enter your zip code. Sometimes it is cheaper to purchase inexpensive used copies of books from sources like BookFinder.com than to borrow them from us.
• We do not typically stock the textbooks required for your courses. Since textbooks quickly become outdated and are generally not used for library “research” purposes the library does not buy them. Since textbooks are needed for an entire term and not the three-week borrowing time allotted for library materials, students should obtain their own copies.  While you will usually need to purchase required textbooks, we do seek to provide the other information resources needed for your courses.