LibGuides: UMass Lowell Library Access for Alumni: Welcome

•The library’s online subscription contracts are restricted to current students and staff. The recent upgrade in the enterprise software changed the authentication process to require both active email and active enrollment for access to the library subscriptions.

•Our contracts do allow guest access for anyone who visits the UML Libraries.

•Also, for everyone in the state, the Boston Public Library offers a set of databases. They offer an e-card for remote access. They offer many e-books. If you search their catalog for ‘javascript’ for example, there are 105 e-books.

•For articles, Google Scholar includes expanding open access content; and your public library will order articles you need through their interlibrary loan system.

Access for Alumni of Technical Subject Areas

The library's vendor contracts permit online, offsite access only for currently registered students. However, in-person access is allowed at UMass Lowell as well as the other state universities and colleges.

For the discovery phase, Google Scholar is comprehensive, publicly-available, and links to many open access documents, and also indexes patents.

Also, for discovery, the Dimensions database is a good complement to Google Scholar.

And Google Books lets you search, and discover, tens of millions of books word-by-word.

To use the specialized databases for discovery and article access, you can visit, in-person, UMass Lowell, Boston, Amherst, Worcester, or Dartmouth—where a guest pass lets you search everything except SciFinder (Chem Abstracts). You can also visit any of the other State universities (Salem State, Worcester State, Framingham State, etc.)

Another mode of access is the interlibrary loan service at your public library. The Framingham library, for example, has an online request form. These transactions can be completed online—e.g. discovering an item, requesting the article from the public library, and having the article emailed to you. (Books are generally borrowed in the print edition.)