I don't follow your first paragraph. Could you point to the search engines at ISU and WUStL?
You can find any university's library by googling , and somewhere on that page will be their search engine - which searches every service they have a subscription to. For example, Iowa State's library page has the search box front and center on the main page.
The main point is that you can typically use the search engine as a non-student, but the results will just be the citations instead of the full article. If you want the full articles, you can often just go to the library and use a computer there to get access (true of WUSTL for sure).
As a side note, ...
I'd like to get better at doing literature searches. Luke has written a bit about this, but I still have lots of questions.
I've mostly been using Google Scholar; it seems OK, but not stellar. What other tools are useful and for what? Added: is there a good way to find papers that cite a many of a set of papers (the idea being that if I find a number of relevant papers, I want to see if there's a review which covers them)?
How do you look specifically for review papers and/or books? For example, I'm interested in cognitive skill acquisition and I've found a review paper from 1996 but I'd like to find recent review papers on the same or closely related topics and haven't had any luck. Are there specific keywords or phrase permutations that often help? Is searching just the papers that cite an older paper useful? Is searching the same journal useful?
How do you search for criticism? Lets say I've found a paper that uses a particular method or theory but I want to know whether there are significant criticisms. Are there phrases that are often associated criticism papers?
Are there any activities that are especially good for practicing literature searches?