Library & Resources

The VCFA Catalog, “WorldCat,” is a database that combines millions of books, sound recordings, periodical titles, movies, maps, musical scores, and manuscripts from library collections around the world. Most titles are available via Interlibrary Loan, and VCFA e-books and thousands of public domain titles are immediately available in full-text formats.

Please see our guides below for more information about using WorldCat and your library account.

If you are having trouble logging in, please email [email protected].

Here is a searchable list of full-text journals owned by the VCFA library. You also can search all full-text books using the title or ISBN, and you can locate specific full-text articles owned by the VCFA using the bibliographic citation for the article.

OverDrive is one of the world’s premier digital reading platforms. Through it, we have thousands of e-books you can borrow and download to most devices for free. You can access our e-books from anywhere. Simply log in with your VCFA Library account to get started.

We ask that you return e-books you finish or no longer wish to read back to the collection as early as possible. Returning e-books early allows other people to enjoy the title and helps to reduce wait time for popular or required titles.

This is a list of resources freely available online, which we update frequently. You can find resources for specific programs by selecting the tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of scholarly content in a trusted digital archive. (Username and password required.)

ARTSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of scholarly content in a trusted digital archive. (Username and password required.)

Project MUSE is a collection of high-quality, peer-reviewed journals in the humanities. This collection provides a highly relevant set of research journals for art schools, museums, performing arts organizations, and related institutions. (Username and password required).

InfoTrac provides periodical and news information through an intuitive, user-friendly search interface for researchers at all levels. Content includes more than 12,000 titles spanning nearly 30 years.

ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) is the world’s most widely used index to education-related literature. Established in 1966, ERIC is supported by the US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement and is administered by the US National Library of Education (NLE). ERIC is the largest education database in the world, containing over 1.5 million records of journal articles, research reports, curriculum and teaching guides, conference papers, dissertations and theses, and books.

The industry’s largest and most affordable e-book subscription database now includes a growing selection of more than 70,000 e-books from over 500 trusted publishers. (Username and password required.)

Children’s Literature reviewers read and critically review more than 5,000 books annually. Our mission is to help teachers, librarians, childcare providers and parents make appropriate literary choices for children.

“The Index to Printed Music (IPM) is an invaluable resource for music researchers and students. IPM is the only online resource for finding individual pieces of music printed in standard scholarly editions, with over 356,000 index records of individual music works.” – EBSCO

A quickly growing, free, public domain virtual library that as of January, 2011 contains 33,659 works , 83,028 scores, 1,621 recordings, and 4,823 composers. You can also access additional websites for scores not yet contained in the International Music Score Library.

“Art Song Central is principally an archive and directory of free, printable sheet music for singers and voice teachers. An emphasis is placed on standard classical and traditional repertoire.” – Art Song Central

“Catalogues or selected recordings of over 250 independent labels … Classical, Jazz, World, Classic Rock, Nostalgia music … wide range of standard and specialist repertoire…more than 49,740 CD-length recordings equivalent to 714,800 tracks uploaded, with addition of over than 800 CD-length recordings every month…music notes, cover artwork, tracklists, instrumentation, and publisher information…libretti and synopses of more than 700 operas…more than 10,000 composer and artist biographies…pronunciation guide for composer and artist names…glossary, guide to musical terms and work analyses …” – NAXOS Music Library

Free for the entire VCFA community the first step is to create your own personal account and follow the “New to RefWorks? Sign Up for a New Account” instructions. Once your personal account is created you can save any citation from VCFA databases to your own personal bibliography. There are many benefits to having a personal RefWorks account. Download the “Cite-N-Write” application and use an abbreviated version of RefWorks within your word processor to automatically include properly formatted footnotes and references from your personal bibliography as you write. RefWorks output styles include MLA, Chicago, APA, Turabian, and hundreds of others.

The Oxford English Dictionary is the world’s most complete dictionary. Continuously updated, this is the only major dictionary to trace (even time-chart!) the use of every English word.

The Visual Thesaurus is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus of over 145,000 English words and 115,000 meanings, as well as a growing list of entries in Spanish, German, Italian, French, and Dutch. It creates word maps that branch to related terms in a display that encourages deeper exploration. When setting up your free account, available through the VCFA Library website, please use the registration code hewed567.

The Encyclopedia Britannica is regarded as one of the best research sources, offering more than 120,000 articles. It also publishes daily features and provides links to news and other external sites chosen by its editors. It is continuously updated by more than 4,000 expert contributors. Click here for a site tour.

AccessScience is a complete science and technology reference that gathers and synthesizes vast amounts of information and organizes it to give you fast, easy, and accurate access to authoritative articles in all major areas of science and technology. It’s easier than ever to find what you’re looking for and put it to use quickly.

Novelist helps you find books to read and genres to study. NoveList Plus is a comprehensive reader’s advisory resource for fiction and nonfiction. With its intuitive interface and extensive proprietary content, NoveList Plus will help you to answer the question of what to read next. Click here for a site tour.