When I was at a physical campus, my school had a reference desk service: just tell them what you need, and 30 minutes later they've given you a list of every book and article you'll ever need to look at. Saved me about 10 hours of work. Is this service generally available to distance learning students?
Wow, never came across something like that. Would definitely be interested in having access to such a service.
Call the Foy student union at Auburn. They'll answer anything for anyone. Matt Lauer.(sp?). Did a segment on it a few years ago. Seriously though, vie never seen a library that didn't have a reference desk, I think the level of assistance you get there is dependent on the librarian on duty.
I need a rather non-descript publication for my English Thesis at WNMU - I did all the usual goggle searches and found the item but could not retrieve it due to copyright and any number of roadblocks. I sent an email to the Library at WNMU and had the item in my WNMU email two days later. These guys/gals rock.
I've found google scholar does a good job (at least in my areas of expertise). There are other professional search engines but I do not recall their names.
Many times these people are students doing work study. Aside from being generally good people they'll often tell you that their jobs are boring and that doing something a little out of the ordinary (like finding an obscure journal article) is almost fun for them. I usually ask them for their campus email address (ostensibly in case I have a follow up question) and send them a thank you ecard.
I never even had that experience when I was at a physical campus. We were given the assignment, you find your own resources. Never heard about it in distance learning, too.
The search engines at most online libraries for most online schools will do this fairly easily. The drawback is that you do not have a human sorting the articles for actual relevance. You will still have to do some searching through the results, but I find it to be quite easy. Look at the search results, skim abstracts, select the publications you need. A little more work than having the reference desk do it for you, but it's not really all that difficult.