Using Licensed Databases

Databases and other electronic resources provided by University of Portland's Clark Library are licensed resources. Current students, faculty, and staff have on-campus and remote access to these resources. To comply with licenses, users must:

  • limit uses to non-commercial, educational, or personal research purposes
  • not compile data/information found in a licensed resource into a separate database for public use
  • not facilitate unauthorized access by others (i.e., do not share your University of Portland credentials with others)
  • not engage in systematic downloading of licensed content (e.g., downloading entire issues of electronic journals or large-scale downloading from databases) to create other collections of data
  • comply with license terms associated with specific resources, as stated on the resource website or in the library catalog (note: in many cases, license agreements impose greater restrictions on use than does copyright law)
  • not distribute copies of material to individuals or groups outside the UP community, unless the license for the resource specifically allows it
  • not share client software used to search licensed resources with individuals or groups outside the University of Portland community

Violation of these terms might result in loss of access for the entire campus. 

Notes to faculty:

  1. Many licenses restrict the downloading and posting of licensed content on another server, even for use in course-related web sites or course reserves systems. In general, it is preferable to use persistent or stable URLs to the electronic articles rather than to download and store articles on servers.
  2. Most content providers consider data-mining or auto-crawling of their content as an inappropriate use. If you are planning a project that requires data-mining or auto-crawling any library database, please contact your library liaison to obtain permission before starting such activity.

Please contact us at library@up.edu if you have questions about this information or about specific databases.