When I was a kid, the Bookmobile, as it was called, used to park at the end of our street for a couple of hours every Friday afternoon. It transported a small selection of books, as many as could fit into a converted school bus. If a book was located at the main library or at another branch, I could place a request and pick it up the next time the Bookmobile came to town. This outreach service of our municipal library really gave me a feeling of empowerment. I got the same service as an adult!

If you are part of the growing number of Villanova University students enrolled in distance learning courses, you too can feel empowered by taking advantage of many of Falvey Memorial Library’s resources and services available to your on-campus counterparts.

For starters, take a quick, virtual tour and get to know the home page hot spots, especially the online catalog tab where you can search for books held in Falvey’s collection. If you are currently registered in 100% distance learning courses, books can be shipped to you via UPS. The library even pays the shipping charges both ways!

Do you need authoritative, scholarly resources for a paper or research assignment? If you limit your search to Google, then you’re missing out. Your LDAP ID and password will unlock a treasure-trove of electronic resources that can be delivered to your computer screen, from full-text scholarly journal articles to digitized historical documents.

The Library also offers document delivery services to Villanova students, staff, and faculty who are too busy to retrieve and photocopy articles from the physical journal collection in Falvey. If you would like library staff to send you a digitized copy of an article from our print collection, use the Interlibrary Loan Request form on ILLiad.

If you’re unsure where to begin your search, try clicking the “Research” tab on the Falvey home page. Here you will find subject and course guides created by the library’s subject specialists, whose photos and contact information appear on each page. Falvey librarians will also be happy to provide individualized assistance via telephone and e-mail. Look for this button and you can even chat with someone online.

Learning can take place anywhere, and the Falvey staff wants to help you succeed.
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Other helpful links:

Falvey home page
Description of services to distance learners
Hours of service when you can speak to a staff member or subject specialist by phone
Online encyclopedias, dictionaries and more
Help! I have to do research for a paper! (Tutorial)
Part 1: What are scholarly journal articles? (3 min)
Part 2: How do I find scholarly journal articles? (2:42 min)
Part 3: Database searching simplified (3:42 min)