The licenses the library signs for our various resources typically allow use by anyone on the university network but only to authorized users—students, faculty, staff, and employees—from anywhere else. They enforce this by IP address: if your IP address is in the UVM range ("on campus"), then you can access our subscriptions. But if your IP address isn't in UVM's range ("off campus"), you can't. The way we allow our authorized users access from off campus is to run them through EZproxy, which does have a UVM IP address.
So, if you are "on campus", you can go directly to the resource any way you like: Google for it, click on a link on any website, follow links from social media. But, if you're "off campus", you need to use a link that includes EZproxy so they'll know you're authorized. The easiest way to do that is to start at https://dana.uvm.edu. Links from there to databases, journals, and e-books will include EZproxy.