For academic journals and books, your UofT “T-Card” serves as your library card. We have a good Engineering Science library on the 2nd floor of Sandford Fleming Building, and your T-Card is valid for borrowing at all UofT libraries - notably Gerstein Science Library on the east side of King's College Circle and Robarts Library at Wellesley and St. George; unfortunately the libraries are currently (Fall 2020) closed due to COVID, and EngSci library has major renovations under way during this closing. https://engineering.library.utoronto.ca/

So for the present, we are reliant on electronic media for research. Fortunately, UofT subscribes to all (or most?) IEEE journals and other major publishers, all available in digital form. For books and other “print-first” content, there is a growing trend to issuing electronic editions, and UofT Libraries appear to be doing fairly well accessing electronic editions of at least some of these. Search results at onesearch.library.utoronto.ca show both print and electronic versions where available.

You can see what journals we get by searching here:

https://search.library.utoronto.ca/index?SearchFilter=206416

You can access journals and e-books online by verifying your affiliation with UofT. If working on campus, any UofT internet connection including UofT wifi can simply visit the journal website and will automatically be recognized as a subscriber to any electronic journal UofT gets. The IEEE Xplore site offers this subscriber recognition for UofT.

Since most of us are working remotely most or all of the time, you'll need to get familiar with ways to access these 'subscriber only' resources from off campus. There are several options for this - use whichever you find most convenient:

If there is a computer on campus assigned for your use, you can connect to it remotely, and use the browser on the on-campus computer to visit journal websites as a subscriber. For an on-campus Windows PC, simply make sure that “Allow Remote Desktop” is enabled, then use Remote Desktop Connection on your off-campus computer to connect to the on-campus computer. For Mac OS or Linux PCs on campus, you can configure other remote access software specific to that PC's O/S, such as Apple Remote Desktop or VNC, or connect over SSH. PCs on ECE's network are protected by ECE's departmental firewall, so for any of these types of connection you'll need to use the ECE VPN any time you want to use Windows RDP to reach a PC inside of ECE.

You can also run software such as MATLAB on the on-campus computer, leave it running, and it will continue even if you disconnect from an RDP connection to it. When you reconnect the running programs and open documents will still be open.

On your own device - PC, Mac, or tablet - you can connect to the University's central VPN called UTORvpn (this is a different service than ECE VPN). The UofT VPN serves as an internet gateway, so with UTORvpn connected from off campus, visiting journal websites gets you subscriber access just as for an on-campus connection. The UTORvpn uses the single-sign-on system of UTORid and password. This site has links with details on how to configure UTORvpn on each of the different operating systems it supports:

https://isea.utoronto.ca/services/vpn/utorvpn/users/

In a browser on your own computer connected off campus, you can also use the library's web proxy service without connecting to UTORvpn (e.g. if you are a guest on the computer and can't install the Cisco AnyConnect VPN software). This page shows how to use the library proxy service for individual journal web pages:

https://onesearch.library.utoronto.ca/node/21729

The my.access proxy service is also a good way to create links to subscriber-only content to share with students, on Quercus, in course notes, email, or even public web pages. The my.access rewritten URL will direct any visitor to the UTORid single-sign-on; UofT students will be able to log on and access the content, while non-members of UofT could receive the link (forwarded email, e.g.) but will not be given access.

You can rewrite a journal URL manually by: (a) replacing each dot in the URL domain name with a dash, and then (b) appending the exact text '.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca' to the end of the rewritten domain name, just before the first single slash of the page path

As an example, here is the my.access rewritten URL to access IEEE's XPlore https://ieeexplore.ieee.org home page with full UofT subscriber access to Spectrum and all IEEE journals in UofT's subscription:

https://ieeexplore-ieee-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/Xplore/home.jsp

There is a user-friendly app for accessing journals through university library rights called “Browzine.” available at https://browzine.com/ You can access it in any browser on a desktop or laptop; or, on a tablet, in either Android or iOS, you can install the Browzine app. You configure Browzine to know that your university library is University of Toronto. It will send you to the single-sign-on to verify your UTORid and password (it can save this so you don't need to keep entering the password each time.) Once logged in, you can search for journals by title, then add favorite journals to your “shelf.” You can then open the journal to see a list of issues, open an issue to see the TOC, and browse and read articles from there.

In any browser, you can configure the https://scholar.google.com Google Scholar page to know what library you are linked to. On the Google Scholar home page, in the menu (striped icon at the top left) choose “Settings.” In the Settings screen, in the left side list, click “Library Links.” Then under “Show library access links for,” type “University of Toronto” and check both the UT Library links that appear:

With Google Scholar set up with UofT Libraries linked, any search result that has an electronic version available through our library subscriptions should display a new link to the right of the result, saying “Get it! (UTL)” Once you complete the UTORid single-sign-on one time, these links will then open the linked result directly without prompting again. The Library Link setting is PC-specific and per-browser (you'd need to set it up once in each browser on each computer you use.) The single-sign-on access may only persist for that browser session – either rebooting or quitting the browser and restarting it may require you to do single-sign-on once for the first “Get it!” link you follow in the new browser session.

As you can see there are plenty of alternatives for taking advantage of UofT's extensive collections and journal subscriptions. I suggest you go through setting up at least two or three of these that interest you, and see which route is the most comfortable for your work flow. You may find two or more of these prove helpful in different stages of your work.