The University of Iowa Libraries provides access to not only the UI Libraries online catalog, but to many other online and electronic resources as well. Most of these resources – bibliographic and/or full text databases – are commercial products for which the UI enters into a licensing agreement with the business provider. This license agreement, for which the Libraries pays a fee, permits access to the commercial product for students, faculty, and staff of the University of Iowa and, for some resources, to onsite users of a campus library.
Therefore, the UI Libraries is not legally able to provide access to alumni, independent scholars, contributors or Iowa citizens where a commercial product has a license agreement that restricts access to specific authorized users, or to those who are physically in a campus library.
It is important for alumni and others with ties to the University to understand that we are unable to provide open access to these commercial products that are produced and licensed to many markets (e.g., health care professionals, businesses, other academic institutions, etc.) for a profit. Everything that is on the Internet is definitely not free and those electronic resources that have greatest value to a research institution are often very costly.
Revised 8/03
Originally adopted 2/98