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Library Access

Saint Mary’s College welcomes alumni and the public to use the SMC Library. You may search the databases and use books and periodicals within the Library building at no charge.

NOTE: If visiting campus, please refer to the Public Safety office for information about guest parking. Daily parking permits are available for purchase at the guest parking lots. 

Borrowing Books

To borrow books, SMC alumni may purchase a library card for a $10 annual fee ($75 for non-alumni community members).

Photo ID and, if applicable, verification of alumni status (e.g., via the alumni directory, your diploma, or the Alumni Office), is required.

See our FAQ page on loan periods

See the page for all of the Borrowing and Access Policies

Remote Access

Due to license agreements, remote access to most online databases is limited to current SMC students, staff, and faculty. Student off-campus access to all the Library databases is available until IT Services deletes your SMC username and password from the authentication database, usually a few months after graduation.

However, a few database do allow alumni access from off-campus when you sign up for limited off-campus alumni database access.

Off campus, alumni have access to the following databases.

• Project MUSE - humanities and social science content from more than 120 of the world's finest university presses and scholarly societies. 
• SAGE Business Cases - business case studies. 
• Sage Journals - full-text access to over over 460 journals published by SAGE Publications, primarily in Business, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science, Technology and Medicine. 
• Sage Knowledge ebooks - reference encyclopedias and handbooks published by SAGE covering the social sciences and education. 

Free Resources

Google Scholar links to open-access versions of many scholarly articles.

Certain databases, like PubMed (which indexes medical publications) and ERIC (which indexes education publications), contain some full-text articles that are open-access (readable by everyone). However, many of the indexed articles will not have full text without a subscription to those journals. Many government reports are also free on the web. 

Many public libraries also subscribe to some of the same databases that the SMC Library does. For instance, the San Francisco Public Library provides cardholders (all California residents are eligible for a SFPL library card) with off-site access to Mergent, Morningstar, JSTOR, Academic Search Complete, Literature Resource Center, New York Times Historical, San Francisco Chronicle Historical, Dance in Video, and more. You may discover new resources through your public library that SMC Library doesn't have, such as Hoopla (streaming movies and TV), audiobooks, LearningExpress test prep, Treehouse coding courses, downloadable ebooks through Overdrive, and more! Your local college or university's library may also be open to the public. 

You may also want to click through the UC Berkeley Library's guide to Freely Available Resources for Research.