Faculty Information: Your Research

• Faculty Loan Periods
• Borrowing from Other Libraries
• Borrowing a laptop
  A small pool of laptops are available to be checked out for up to 2 weeks. These are intended for faculty awaiting the arrival of a new computer or while their laptop is being repaired. Laptop loan request form.  Contact Amber Rieger in Access Services for more information. 

Accessing Library Resources

Need to access the online library from off campus? Connecting is easy!

• You do not need VPN to access library resources.
• From the library catalog: Click on the "Sign-In" link in the "View It" section. Sign in with your Williams username (no @williams) and password. Once you are signed in, you'll have seamless access to library resources during that search session.
• For subscribed content on the A-Z database list or the research guides, you will be prompted for your Williams login.
• If you prefer searching on the open web, downloading the LibKey Nomad browser extension can help you connect to Williams-subscribed resources.

Research Assistance and Support from off-campus

At any point, whether on or off-campus, use our Ask A Librarian service to request assistance.  You may either reach us via chat or via email. 

For more information on services that support Remote Learning, see Studying Away.

Faculty members may appoint students and others who assist them to be their proxy borrowers. Proxies can check out materials and request interlibrary loans on behalf of faculty.  Faculty are responsible for all materials checked out on their behalf by proxies.

To assign a proxy, fill out the Designate a proxy online form.  

If you have any questions about this service, contact that Circulation Desk at Sawyer Library: 413-597-2501. 

In support of faculty research, the library is a member of regional, national and international consortia that enable us to provide access to materials and negotiate subscriptions to databases.

• Center for Research Libraries (CRL) 
  International consortium of university, college and independent research libraries, dedicated to providing access to rare primary source materials. Description of collections.  CRL's Response to COVID-19
• HathiTrust 
  Partnership of academic and research institutions offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
  In response to COVID-19 HathiTrust is offering Emergency Temporary Access Services which enables access digital copies of 50% of the library's print collection + 6.5M of titles in the public domain 
• Boston Library Consortium (BLC) 
  Interlibrary loan partnership between libraries from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Connecticut
• Northeast Research Libraries (NERL),
  Affiliation enables licensing of many of the online research databases used by faculty

In addition to the resources available through these membership based services, Williams librarians support the use of freely available collections such as the Digital Public Library of America, the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress Digital Collections, and Europeana. These platforms of digitized materials cover the widest range of disciplines. To learn more about discipline-specific portals of digitized materials, faculty may reach out to their departmental librarian liaison, or to the Special Collections librarians. 

If there are other memberships or digitized collections that you would like the library to consider to support faculty research, please reach out to Research Services.