Support for Distance Learners

Students enrolled in the University's Distance Education programs and those who access Randall Library services remotely have access to a variety of online resources and library services. They are also eligible for document delivery. These items are mailed or sent electronically to the home address.

Library access is considered essential to success at UNCW and we encourage students to take full advantage of all the resources available. To locate journal articles, we suggest that you search one of the Library's databases for access to full-text and citations. To obtain research materials not available electronically or at your extension location, follow the instructions provided below for requesting ILL/Document Delivery services

Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery
To request materials via ILL/Document Delivery Services, you must first register with ILLiad, UNCW's ILL/Document Delivery Service. Be sure to choose Distance Education as your Status on the ILLiad registration form. Once registered with ILLiad, choose either book, journal article or dissertation/thesis from the Request Types menu. Complete all the bibliographic information requested, and click on the "submit request" button to send it to ILL for processing. If the requested item is in the Randall Library collection and a journal article, it will be scanned and sent to your email account. If the request is for a book, video, DVD, or CD it will be checked out to you and mailed to the address you listed in ILLiad when you registered. (Important note-if you also maintain a campus mail box, please indicate that in ILLiad so we can mail materials there if needed.) If an item needs to be returned to the library, a return postage paid mailing label will be included along with return mailing instructions.

Off Campus Access
Access to the Randall Library databases, course reserves and ILL is controlled by your library record. If you have not already created a PIN in your library record, do so first by following the information provided at this link. If you need further assistance, please call the reference desk at 962.3760 or send an IM to Randalldesk or Randalldesk2. Learn more: http://library.uncw.edu/web/research/index.html.

Library Catalog
Use the library catalog to search for books, journals, government publications, videos, DVD's, music and other materials. The catalog also contains links to government sites, WWW sites, and provides access to electronic versions to 24,000 periodicals.

Research/Reference Services
For help in getting started with your research, visit the Library's reference homepage . Additional assistance is given in the Using the Library Guide (a PDF file). In depth research assistance is also available to distance education students from the reference librarians at Randall Library by calling 962.3760. You may also contact the reference librarians via the web by clicking on the Ask a Librarian link and using the chat, email, or IM functions.

Electronic Resources
To access the Randall Library electronic resources, click on Search the Research Databases on the library homepage. The Database and Article Searching page offers browsing by alphabet and subject and lists frequently used databases. To select, click on the database name and follow the search instructions. To search for electronic access to particular journals or newspapers, from the homepage click on the drop down box to search the library catalog by journal title and follow full text links where provided.

Course Reserves
On the Library homepage click on Reserves and on the button labeled Reserves. At the welcome screen click Electronic Reserve and Reserve Pages and search by using one of the tabs. Choose Accept at the copyright screen to move to the reserve list. Items listed as Adobe Acrobat (PDF) are available to view or print and items listed with format Hard Copy Reference with link are physical items that must be checked out or used in the building.

Questions
Any questions not addressed above may be referred to Madeleine Bombeld, Access Services Librarian via email or AOL IM accesslib. For ILL/DD questions please email libraryill@uncw.edu or phone to 910.962.3272 or 7005.

Reference help contact information is available at Get Help or by phone 962.3760.