About the LRC

As its name implies, the Online Card Catalog (OCC) is the index that provides bibliographic access only to the collection of the National Emergency Training Center's (NETC) Learning Resource Center (LRC). While the LRC is the on-campus library for the staff and students of the National Fire Academy (NFA) and the Emergency Management Institute (EMI), the OCC will function for Internet users as a database on fire service and emergency management topics. Its fundamental service to Internet users is one of identification. The OCC identifies published resources on topics of professional interest to fire service and emergency management personnel.

Since the LRC's primary mission is to support the instructional activities of the NFA and the EMI, the OCC reflects that goal. The LRC concentrates on natural and technological hazards but primarily on their social and behavioral sciences aspects. As examples, the LRC has some information on seismology but more on earthquake preparedness; some information on fire protection engineering but more on public fire education. Generally, students at the NFA and EMI are not scientists but practicing emergency managers and first responders. The LRC's collection has been built for these user populations and the OCC will be most useful to them.

What the Online Card Catalog isn't:

The OCC is NOT a full-text database. It contains citations to journal articles, books and reports, not the text of any of these items. At most, some items have abstracts.
The OCC is NOT a document delivery service. Searchers cannot order copies of any of the items cited in the OCC directly from the LRC.

So What about Access to Materials?

All of the display and print formats in the OCC contain one of two fields:

ILL: yes / no
AVAILABILITY: Available on Interlibrary Loan / Not Available on Interlibrary Loan

These fields indicate whether or not the item is available from the LRC on Interlibrary Loan (ILL).

If you are a first-time user of the OCC, please review our Hints and Tips section before you begin searching.