• Get help finding sources, navigating interlibrary loan, using databases.

  • Request books from main campus to SEEC.

Your helpers

Need help? Ask librarian Jen Hall-Bowman. She can answer library questions and connect you with book deliveries from main campus libraries.

Overview

INSTAAR's library in SEEC room 215 (the Albert A. Bartlett Center) helps INSTAAR researchers find sources; navigate interlibrary loan, databases, and other library tools; and learn information skills. Books can be delivered from the main campus libraries.

INSTAAR catalog

To search INSTAAR's holdings

  1. Go to the INSTAAR catalog
  2. Click the "Sign In as Guest" link.
  3. On the next screen, type your query into the search box and click the "Go" button to get your results.

Book return

Books can be returned to CU Libraries by dropping them in the red bin just inside the door of the library. 

Nearby libraries

INSTAAR publications

These resources are not included in CU Libraries' Chinook database - make sure to check there for publisher and article databases like Web of Science, WorldCat, GeoRef, and JSTOR.

Antarctic Treaty Database - find the Recommendations, Measures, Decisions, and Resolutions of the Arctic Treaty Committee Meetings from the first meeting in 1961 to the present. You can also search measures pending approval by each of the Consultative Parties to the Antarctic Treaty.

ACM Digital Library - full text of all Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) articles, focusing on computing research and information technology.

Access Science: The Online Encyclopedia of Science and Technology - useful for looking up scientific terms that are new to you or for explaining terms to lay audiences.

Arctic Discovery & Access (ADA) - a digital educational service that provides access to scientific research publications, research projects derived from license and permit information, K-12 educational resources, data management resources for researchers, virtual exhibits, and the Arctic Institute of North America's online archives and special collections. ADA expands upon the former Arctic Science and Technology Information System (ASTIS), project of the Arctic Institute of North America and the University of Calgary, which began operations in 1978.

Arctic Health Portal - from the National Library of Medicine and University of Alaska, a collection of information on diverse aspects of the arctic environment and the health of Northern peoples, including an index of hard-to-find publications, government reports, gray literature, and non-print media.

Barents Portal - an international effort (Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden) to share knowledge about the Barents region; includes links, news, photos, maps, and articles about every aspect of culture, environment, history, indigenous peoples, economy, transport, etc.

Canada Depository Services Program - Canadian government documents, including reports from Natural Resources Canada, Canada's National Climate Change Process, and the Canadian Polar Commission. Most documents are freely available as PDF files from anywhere on the web; the rest are available through the INSTAAR Information Center computer.

CiteSeerX - Scientific literature digital library indexes full-text online articles, including algorithms, software, and techniques. Also provides citation indexing. Focuses mainly on computer and information science.

Circumpolar Health Bibliographic Database indexes 7,900 publications on all aspects of human health in the circumpolar region, focusing strongly on Canada. A project of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Team in Circumpolar Chronic Disease Prevention.

COLD Database hosted by the American Geological Institute - search the Antarctic Bibliography, the Cold Regions Science and Technology Bibliography, and USPA Permafrost Alert Program publications.

Collected Algorithms of the ACM - software and algorithms associated with the Transactions on Mathematical Software and other ACM journals, available to download.

Dept. of Energy SciTech Connect - DOE research and development reports in chemistry, environmental science, energy, engineering, physics, biology, information science, and materials: most documents are provided full-text.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - search through free, open-access, quality controlled journals. More than half of the 9900 journals indexed are searchable at the article level.

DTIC Online - Defense Technical Information Center is the largest freely-available repository for DoD and government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business related information available. It hosts nearly 1 million full-text reports and documents, including USGS papers.

Encyclopedia of Earth - an electronic reference about the earth, its environments, and their links with society, written wiki-style by a community of scholars. Includes articles from published encyclopedias and other reference sources as well. More than 2000 articles are included to date.

Encyclopedia of Life - an online encyclopedia of plant, animal, and fungal species that aims to capture information on all 1.8 million named species on Earth within ten years. The project combines a wiki/web 2.0 approach of public contributions with expert curation by scientists. The encyclopedia works both as a field guide and a "macroscope" to discover patterns in ecology and evolution otherwise too large or complex to perceive.

Geologic Guidebooks of North America Database - free access from the AGI to this index to mostly geologic field trip guidebooks from 1940 through the present.

GIS Bibliography - references to most key geographic information systems literature, spanning 1970 to the present, collected by the librarians at Esri.

Government Information Online - a virtual reference service that answers your questions about government documents and information sources via live chat. The librarians who tend to the service are all government documents librarians from official depository libraries; if they can't find it, it doesn't exist.

GovInfo - official U.S. government documents website, from the Government Printing Office.

Grants.gov - a portal for information on federal agencies that manage grant funds. Use it to find and apply for grants.

IEEE Xplore electronic library - full-text access to all Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers published materials.

Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Database - search citations from the Deep Sea Drilling Project, Ocean Drilling Program, and Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Research, 1969-present. For data and full-text publications, see the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program web site.

IPY Publications Database - a collaborative project to record all International Polar Year-related publications. About 3000 publications are listed so far, of which 1,300 are from the fourth (2007-08) IPY.

Native Health Database - citations and abstracts on the health and health care of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Nations. Coverage is from 1652 to the present.

National Archives - Access to Archival Databases - the U.S. government's main repository has made digital searching of records relatively simple with a revamped global database search. If it's a government document you want, try here.

Northern Contaminants Program - search for NCP publications on contaminants in traditionally harvested foods and aboriginal food use. A project within the Arctic Discovery & Access information source by the Arctic Institute of North America and the University of Calgary.

Northern Research Portal - resources from the University of Saskatchewan Archives and Library for the study of northern Canada and the circumpolar world. Materials for teachers (interpretive exhibits, etc.), general readers, and advanced researchers draw from photographs, unpublished materials, and maps. Detailed finders guides for archival collections and pointers to online bibliographies by subject and geographic area are unique features of this well-organized site.

Nunavik Bibliography - growing coverage of all aspects of Nunavik and adjoining marine areas, by a partnership of the Inuit of Nunavik, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, the Canadian Circumpolar Institute, and the Arctic Institute of North America.

Open Access Theses and Dissertations - To search for theses and dissertations, you should also use the ProQuest Digital Dissertations database available through Norlin. Because this is a subscription database, however, people outside universities with their strong library resources are unable to search comprehensively for theses. You might consider posting your work to OpenThesis.org, an open-source, freely available database.

Open Polar - Open access research data and publications within the thematic scope of polar regions. It includes hundreds of thousands of documents from around the world, only about 40% of which are findable through common online search tools (like Google). You can search by map. Hosted by the University of Tromsø Library in cooperation with Universität Bielefeld. Most documents are in English. (Supercedes High North Research Documents.)

PolarInfo - references to articles from newspapers, conference proceedings, magazines, newsletters, and journals since 1996 on northern subjects, including native peoples, arctic health, education, business, policy, geology, vegetation, and wildlife. A great source for following the progress of debates in the local press in arctic Canada.

RealClimate blog - a climate science commentary site that provides a quick response and missing context to developing media stories.

SPRILIB Antarctica - comprehensive bibliography on Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, with records for materials from 1602-2003. 43,000 records at the moment.

SPRILIB Ice and Snow - Comprehensive bibliography on all aspects of ice and snow worldwide, listing 40,000 items ranging from 1661-2003.

SPRILIB Russian North - 25,000 records on northern Russia and Siberia, for materials from 1671-2003.

U.S. Geological Survey Publications Warehouse - puts an index of everything the USGS has published, and access to full text for most of it, at your fingertips.

Yukon Biodiversity Database - descriptions of 9200 publications and research projects, including grey literature, about the biology of the Yukon and Beaufort Sea. The range of the database includes all aspects of all living things except humans, environmental impacts of human activities, and non-human paleontology. Coverage of research projects is based on information from Yukon-Canada Scientists and Explorers Act licenses since 1982.

While the CU Libraries encompass a number of excellent data sources, this list supplements them with freely available web resources on everything from aerial photos to UNEP graphics.

Aerial Photographs of Colorado - 1,700 digitized aerial photos of Colorado taken by the U.S. Forest Service from 1938 to 1947, searchable using a map interface or geographic keyword search. Images and metadata can be downloaded free of charge. Coverage is from Boulder, Clear Creek, Eagle, Gilpin, Grand, Jefferson, Larimer, and Summit Counties. A project of the CU Libraries' excellent Map Library.

Arctic GIS - Arctic Research Consortium of the United States (ARCUS) site linking to information about the availability of GIS data for the far north.

Arctic Portal - A gateway to the Arctic on the Internet, increases co-operation between both public and private parties across the Arctic. This International Polar Year project is led by Iceland with several partners and at first focused on the needs of the Arctic Council; but has expanded. It hosts news, an integrated document library, project directory, and interactive mapping.

Atiku: The Northern and Arctic Studies Portal - international documentary resources for research on the North and the Arctic, including archives and primary sources; databases; dictionaries and encyclopedias; films; maps, atlases, and geospatial data; and statistics. The portal is a collaboration between Quebec universities Concordia, INRS, Laval, McGill, and UQÀM, and Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec.

Computer Network for Arctic Marine Fauna - a joint German-Russian effort to document the distribution and composition of marine faunal communities on the Eurasian-Arctic shelf, particularly Ophiuroids and invertebrates.

DataONE - The Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) - a community-driven program providing access to data across multiple member repositories, supporting enhanced search and discovery of Earth and environmental data. Supported by the NSF, DataONE ensures preservation and access to multiscale, multidiscipline, and multinational science data across domain boundaries.

dbSEABED - marine substrate information from seafloor surveys is unified in this source, which can import into your GIS or relational database.

Discovering Antarctica - An outreach site from the Royal Geographical Society in partnership with the British Antarctic Survey and U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Multimedia and interactive activities engage visitors in exploring the physical, biological, and human story of the Antarctic continent. Topics are organized in non-traditional but logical ways. Winner of the Geoscience Information Society Best Website Award for 2009.

Federal Land Records - from the Bureau of Land Management, well-organized access to land and mineral use records, a map server showing public lands, Public Land Survey System (PLSS) and other survey-based data, and reference documents on cadastral survey and land records.

Fossilworks: Gateway to the Paleobiology Database - a public resource for the global scientific community, which provides global, collection-based occurrence and taxonomic data for marine and terrestrial animals and plants of any geological age, as well as web-based software for statistical analysis of the data.

FRED - a database for the New Zealand Fossil Record File (FRF). This is a recording scheme for fossil localities in NZ and nearby regions including SE Pacific Islands and the Ross Sea region of Antarctica, and is jointly managed by Geoscience Society of New Zealand and GNS Science.

GB3D Type Fossils Online - funded by JISC, this database includes type specimens, held in British collections, of macrofossil species and subspecies found in the UK, including photographs, stereo pairs, and 3D digital models.

Géoindex - hosted by the Library of the Université Laval, Canada, this is a geospatial platform for historical and research data of the North. A search will show historic maps and engravings projected over a basemap. New data includes bathymetric data from recent research voyages, etc. Download formats include Esri and Google Earth formats, and historic data are served with a Creative Commons license.

Global Runoff Data Center - the worldwide repository of discharge data and associated metadata, focusing on global river discharge data for the sake of research linking global and local change issues. Operates under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) with the support of the Federal Institute of Hydrology, Germany.

International Ocean Discovery Program - sponsored by funding agencies in the United States, Europe, and Japan, this program conducts basic research into the history of the ocean basins and the nature of the crust below the seafloor.

International Tree-Ring Data Bank - maintained by the NOAA Paleoclimatology Program and World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, this data bank includes raw ring width or wood density measurements and site chronologies for more than 2000 sites on six continents.

Mineral Database from mindat.org - data on minerals worldwide, which you can search by properties, chemical composition, mineral association, or geographic location. The entry for each mineral includes physical and chemical properties, type occurences, crystallography, optical and x-ray powder diffraction data, and related minerals.

National Archive of Marine Seismic Surveys - historic 2D and 3D seismic data covering offshore Alaska, California, and portions of the west coast. ChevronTexaco Corp. donated the data to the AGI in March 2005; the USGS and AGI are partnering in converting the data from magnetic tapes. The data are useful for understanding offshore structural geology, marine sedimentation, and fault systems.

National Centers for Environmental Information - from NOAA, the world's largest active archive of weather and climate data, plus databases describing the solid earth, marine, coastal, and solar-terrestrial environments.

National Map - USGS - A cornerstone of the USGS National Geospatial Program, The National Map is a collaborative effort among the USGS and other federal, state, and local partners to improve and deliver U.S. topographic information.

National Snow and Ice Data Center Data - data sets from many investigators, including data held in the Antarctic Glaciological Data Center (AGDC), ARCSS, Frozen Ground Catalog, NOAA, and World Data Center for Glaciology. Also special collections, such as Glaciers Long-Term Change Photograph Pairs, which match photographs of glaciers taken as early as the 1890s with recent photos taken from the same physical locations.

Niwot Ridge Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) data - includes archived raw data.

On the Cutting Edge - this professional development resource helps keep geoscience faculty up-to-date on both Earth science research and teaching methods. A project of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers and the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College, this useful site with clear navigation works new discoveries and research fairly quickly into classroom settings.

PETLAB - a New Zealand rock catalogue and geoanalytical database. It is operated by GNS, with GNS and Auckland, Waikato, Massey, Victoria, Canterbury and Otago universities contributing data. The database contains locations, descriptions and analyses of rock and mineral samples collected from onland and offshore New Zealand and Antarctica by government, university and industry geologists. Information has been sourced from journal articles, theses, and open file reports.

RealClimate blog - a commentary site on climate science that provides a quick response and missing context to developing media stories.

Picture Library, Scott Polar Research Institute - The photo archive of the Scott Polar Research Institute, digitized and searchable. Scott Polar has the most extensive polar image collection in the world and is especially noted for its historical photographs.

Seismic data on interactive map servers for the world, or for more discrete geographies in Northern CaliforniaSouthern CaliforniaJapan, and Iceland.

UNEP/GRID-Arendal Maps & Graphics Library - Repository for outputs from all UNEP/GRID-Arendal publications, projects, and web products, including figures and illustrations from the popular Vital Graphics series and GLOBIO human impact maps.