Faculty & Instructors

The Library provides access to thousands of journals, books, and media. The vast majority of the Library's collections are in electronic format. Electronic materials allow us to provide access to the entire Concordia community -- on-campus and distant -- from any location and at any time.

While the majority of the Library's collections are available in electronic format, the Library maintains a collection of print materials within the Library building on the St. Paul campus. Print materials can be requested through the Library's OneSearch tool.

We encourage you to ask your students to use and cite electronic materials just as they would print materials. In many cases, the Library's electronic materials are significantly more up-to-date than the Library's limited print materials. Restricting a search of materials to the items available in physical format in the Library would dramatically decrease the odds of finding up-to-date and relevant materials.

OneSearch is the Library's tool for searching across many of our collections all at once. OneSearch is a great place for students to begin their research. In many cases, using OneSearch by itself is sufficient for student research assignments. 

The Library maintains subscriptions to many online databases when students or faculty need to do more extensive or discipline-specific searching.

A complete list of the Library's databases is available alphabetically by title or by subject area.

The Library cannot provide access to every article, journal, and book. As an alternative, we maintain cooperative relationships with many libraries in the region and nationally, which allows students and faculty to easily request materials they can not access through Concordia's collections. Requesting materials from other libraries is referred to as interlibrary loan.

Many publishers and information providers provide paid access to articles and journals. You should never pay to access an article or journal. If you're looking for a specific citation, use OneSearch to find it. If the Library cannot provide direct access to the citation, you will be able to submit an interlibrary loan request.

We encourage you to use Library materials in your courses. By linking to Library materials from your course, you can decrease the course material costs for your students and ensure students have easy, accessible, and sustainable access to materials.

As a general rule, you should not embed PDFs of entire articles, journals, or books in your courses. More often than not, doing so is a violation of copyright law. As an educator and employee of an educational institution, you do have the right to use a reasonable portion of copyrighted materials in your courses. This right is broadly known as "fair use." See our Fair Use and Copyright page for additional details.

You can work with your Library liaison to determine the best way to incorporate Library resources within your courses. In many cases, the Library can work with you to find alternatives to traditional course materials students must pay for. This includes existing Library-provided content, new content acquired by the Library, and "open" or freely available content. See our Affordable Course Materials page for additional details.

If you think the Library should add a particular book or journal to its collection, please email us at library@csp.edu with an explanation of how the material would benefit Concordia students and the academic mission of the University.

In addition, your college's Library liaison can work with you to select and prioritize new materials to add to the Library's collection.