A library's ability to expand its collections is determined by a number of factors, including size of the physical facility itself, budget available for making purchases, and any collection development policy that guides the institution's purchasing and retaining materials. Budgets will vary with economic conditions. In state funded systems like UNF, economic conditions in the state directly affect the amount of money available for adding resources to the library's collections. In years of good budgets and when collection policy doesn't limit the amount of materials purchased by the library, the primary constraint on what can be added is the amount of storage space available in the library building.

Prior to its addition and renovation which was completed in 2006, the UNF Library spent 22 years in the same building with no expansion. With no increase in space, the library was suffering from a critical shortage of room to add new materials and still maintain adequate seating for researchers. The library's general book collection was overflowing the available installed shelving, so more shelving was ordered and installed and user study and work areas were relocated. Overcrowding in the Periodicals Collection in the library also became a major cause for concern. As a means of opening up additional space in that collection, the library undertook a program of boxing hundreds of volumes of older periodicals that were available in online format. By subscribing to a system called JSTOR, the library was able to free up considerable space for new materials in the periodicals collection and offer users online access to volumes removed from the print collection. Periodicals offered via the JSTOR system were stored off-campus to provide more shelving space for new issues of periodicals.

A similar project was also undertaken in the library's Reference Area. Numerous print indexes that have been replaced by online databases have now been removed from the shelves, thus freeing up shelving space and also providing the library with more room to add more computer accesses for users.

With a newly expanded facility, the library is not quite so pressed for space and has been able to accommodate more seating for library users and has been able to bring its off-campus materials back on campus. Even so, as more and more material becomes available online, the library will likely balance its purchase of print materials with purchases of online materials.

One of the primary advantages of buying online materials is that the library can offer researchers access to materials over the Internet. By supplying identification, UNF researchers can access almost all of the library's full text research systems and not only search for materials in a variety of disciplines, but also access the full articles from their home or office computers. The UNF Library's online research system has grown to include over 200 databases covering research in nearly any discipline and to more than 12,000 fulltext journals, magazines, and newspapers. By comparison, the print periodicals collections number around 2500 subscriptions. In the library's current facility, there is no room to accommodate an additional 12,000 subscriptions, so the ability to access materials online essentially expands the storage capibilities of the facility without requiring additional space.

Up until very recently, the library's online purchases had been limited to databases that provided journal, magazine, and newspaper articles online. In Fall 2000 the library also ventured into providing access to the full text of books by offering users access to an online library called netLibrary. netLibrary allows users to establish accounts, paid for by the library, which provide them with full check out capabilities in the online collection. The materials a researcher will find include fiction and nonfiction and vary in nature from academic to popular to scientific to leisure. By subscribing to this online collection, the UNF Library was able to expand its collection once again without exceeding its available floor space.

As more and more resources become available online and as libraries expand their role to include information access to a variety of materials in a variety of formats via online subscriptions, library researchers will find many of their information needs can be satisfied without even coming into the library building at all. The days of finding everything online are not yet here, though, and there is some doubt that those days will arrive very soon. Complicated issues such as copyright protection for authors, licensing agreements between publishers and libraries, and economic considerations of both publishers and libraries continue to provide challenges to libraries trying to provide online access services. Many of these issues have not yet been fully explored, so completely electronic libraries have yet to become fully realized. Most libraries continue to provide print and media materials in a traditional setting while simultaneously offering expanded access to materials through online services.

Fulltext Systems Available via the
UNF Library's Online Collections

Following are some of the primary fulltext service providers currently utilized by the UNF Library. Many individual databases may be available in any of the systems listed and not all sources will have full text.
Blackwell Science —Synergy		Blackwell Synergy is the online journals service from Blackwell Publishing. It holds the content for most of Blackwell's journals, the majority of which are published on behalf of international scholarly and professional societies. Topic areas covered include Agricultural and Animal Sciences, Business, Economics, Finance, Accounting, Mathematics and Statistics, Engineering, Computing and Technology, Health Sciences, Humanities, Law, Life and Physical Sciences, Medicine, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and The Arts.
CCH (Commerce Clearing House)		Commerce Clearing House is a leading publisher of legal and business reference services that are typically housed in library reference collections. The UNF library subscribes to CCH's Business and Finance collection, its Health and Human Resources collection, and its Tax collection.
Elsevier Science Direct		Elsevier is a scientific publisher that publishes journals in the medical and health sciences and in the social sciences. Elsevier currently provides access to over 6.6 million fulltext articles online through its research system.
FirstSearch		FirstSearch is a database system that provides indexing and abstracting and some fulltext articles. The full system includes access to 60 different subject databases. ECO is one of FirstSearch's fulltext databases, providing access to over 5000 journals. ECO covers a variety of journal disciplines from the humanities to the social sciences to the physical sciences.
Gale Group		GaleNet provides the full text of numerous print reference series contained within the library's print Reference Collection as well as access to a number of research publications not in the print collections of the library. UNF Library has access to Gale's Business & Company Resource Center, the History Resource Center, the Health & Wellness Resource Center, the Literature Resource Center, and Gale's biographical and reference services. Gale also provides the library with access to several full text article databases, including Business ASAP, Academic ASAP, and Infotrace OneFile, an investment library known as Investext Plus, and the Modern Language Association's International Bibliography, the world's most comprehensive and authoritave index to literature.
JSTOR		JSTOR provides an online storage system for archival copies of print journals. Current issues are not available in JSTOR. Coverage is usually limited to materials at least 3 years old or older.
Kluwer Journals Online		Kluwer is an academic publisher that provides access to thousands of articles from its print journals through its online system. Research covered includes the applied and behavioral sciences, including medicine, psychology, and education.
Lexis Nexis		LexisNexis provides full-text information from over 5,600 sources including National and regional newspapers, wire services, broadcast transcripts, international news, and non-English language sources, U.S. Federal and state case law, codes, regulations, legal news, law reviews, and international legal information, Shepard’s® Citations for all U.S. Supreme Court cases back to 1789, and business news journals, company financial information, SEC filings and reports, and industry and market news. The UNF library also subscribes to the Lexis Nexis Congressional and Statistical services.
netLibrary		netLibrary provides subscription access to literally thousands of books online. The UNF collection, as of 2005, includes access to over 40,000 titles covering a variety of academic disciplines and including current fiction and nonfiction.
Oxford English Dictionary		The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.
Oxford University Press Journals		The renowned Oxford University Press publishes journals from science, technical, professional, medical, humanities, arts and social science disciplines. This encompasses nearly 200 journals, all well respected in their disciplines.
ProQuest		The ProQuest system of databases includes full text coverage of Business, Criminal Justice, Education, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, Medicine, Nursing, and Psychology. The ProQuest Research Library alone provides indexing for over 3400 titles, with fulltext article access for a majority of the titles.
Standard & Poor's Net Advantage		Find company and industry information in this comprehensive collection of publications from respected investment analysts Standard & Poor's Corporation. Included are S & P's stock and bond references, their trend forecasting news publication The Outlook, and the respected S & P Industry Surveys.
WilsonWeb		WilsonWeb provides access to numerous databases from publisher H.W. Wilson. Wilson OmniFile Full Text, Mega Edition is a multi-disciplinary database providing the complete content (indexing, abstracts, and full text) from six of Wilson's full-text databases: Education Full Text, General Science Full Text, Humanities Full Text, Readers' Guide Full Text, Social Sciences Full Text, and Wilson Business Full Text. Full-text articles from five additional periodical databases are also included when available: Applied Science & Technology Full Text, Art Full Text, Biological & Agricultural Index, Index to Legal Periodicals & Books, and Library Literature & Information Science Full Text. Indexing begins in 1982, abstracts in 1984, and full-text coverage in 1994. Each database has its own start dates for indexing, abstracting, and full text; start dates for full-text rights to individual journals vary within a database.
For a full accounting of fulltext databases provided through the UNF Library's electronic collections, visit the UNF Databases page.
To identify the online availability of a particular journal through UNF Library's subscriptions, use the E-Journals link on the library's home page and search by journal title. If the journal is available to UNF researchers online, you will be presented with links to the databases that provide access.