If your instructor has requested that you not use Internet or Web sources, you may want to clarify what is meant.  

Online Collections consist of published journals, magazines, reports, documents, newspapers, and books.

Libraries subscribe and provide access to Online Collections (databases) for their patrons.  Many Online Collections are not freely available.  The UAF Rasmuson Library contracts with information vendors (aggregators), such as OCLC FirstSearch, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts and others, to provide pre-selected journals and magazines that meet specific criteria established for universities.  When you search one of these databases, you are not searching the Web, but pre-selected material that is the equivalent of what you might find on a library shelf in print form.  The Alphabetical list of online resources provides access to Online Collections to which the Rasmuson Library subscribes via the Internet.  Online Collections provide easy access to many scholarly, technical, and professional journals, spanning all disciplines.

• When you search for an article in an online collection (database), the article that appears in full-text online exists originally as a print resource.  This material has already undergone editorial or peer-review during the publication process and is considered reliable.

• Resources in Online Collections are easily identifiable by their citation information.  Even in a computer database the source will be clearly documented.

For journals:	author, title of article, title of journal, volume and issue number, date, and page numbers.
For books:	author, title, place of publication, name of publisher, and date.

• Online Collections generally use databases to manage data and therefore, are not searchable by Internet search engines.  These databases have internal search engines specific to their product.

Internet or Web sources include web sites of businesses, organizations, government agencies, universities and individuals.

Most Internet or Web sites are publicly accessible for free.  Access to copyrighted information, however, may still be limited or available via subscription only.  Many sites also provide access to quality information.  Unfortunately, quality sites reside right alongside total rubbish.  Web sites are inexpensive to create and may have been created by anyone with any level of expertise.

• In most cases, there is no editorial or peer-review process for Web pages.  This means reliability of web pages is not dependable.

• Of course Internet or Web sources have Internet addresses or Uniform Resource Locator codes (URLs).  This makes them easily identifiable.  For example:  The URL   http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/ANWR/   address identifies  The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: A Special Report .  However, URLs change frequently and URL information is not as reliable as the citation information provided by online collections.

• Internet or Web sources are accessible via Internet search engines.  Search engines use programs such as spiders, robots (bots), webcrawlers, etc. to search for terms in web pages and store them in a database.  It is important to note that all search engines do not search in the same manner, or search the same material, and may rank hits differently.  Ranking may depend on how many times or where your term(s) appear in the page or whether a fee has been paid to rank the page prominently.  Therefore, careful evaluation of Web resources is essential.

**Be sure to visit Evaluating Information Resources for information on evaluating these information resources.