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COTC
students are served by the OSU Libraries. The resources described below are
accessed through the links on the OSU Libraries’ homepage; this is its
URL:
How to get started?
Connect to the OSU Libraries Web site. A button with the words Sign In Here for Off Campus Access should appear near the top of the Web page. If the Sign In button appears, click the button and a page with the sign-in will appear. If the Sign In button does not appear:
If you use a commercial
Internet provider, you should contact them and ask if they support proxy servers
or use a proxy server themselves.
You might encounter problems if your ISP uses a proxy server
The campus proxy server maintained by OIT still works. Connecting via it
requires that you change the manual proxy settings in your browser software;
instructions to do that are at
http://library.osu.edu/sites/techservices/whatsnew.php
Many users do not like connecting via the campus proxy server because it
requires changing the manual proxy settings, so the
Libraries' purchased proxy software and
implemented it as an easier alternative for off-campus access.
Regional
Campus Technical College Users
Person enrolled or employed by Central Ohio
Technical College in Newark should complete the Regional Campus Technical
College Users portion of the sign-in form:
OSCAR
is the OSU Libraries’ online catalog. Use
it to find records of library materials of any kind
located in the Libraries’ collections.
Records in OSCAR show which OSU library has the item, the L. C.
call number for the item, and, most important, whether it can be checked
out. If the status bar shows the
designation “AVAILABLE”, any qualified user can request it.
The designation for the Newark Campus Library in OSCAR is NWK.
OhioLINK
is the network of college, university, community and technical college libraries
(plus the State Library of Ohio) to which OSU belongs.
There is a link to its central catalog on the Libraries’ homepage; all
students, faculty and staff at member institutions may request materials in the
same way that they can order items in OSCAR.
Periodical
Indexes give
citations to specific articles in magazines, professional journals, and
sometimes to other sorts of information such as chapters in books or Ph.D.
dissertations. Many of the online
indexes have links to the full text of the articles cited; the article can be
printed from the record in the index.
Those in the list will be the most generally useful for students:
Academic Search
Premier: Citations to articles in hundreds of
periodicals with links to the full text of over 60% of the articles that a
search will find. It frequently
offers a choice of full text or page image if illustrations are important.
ArticleFirst: An index of the items listed on table of
contents pages of over 12,000 journals. This index covers articles, news
stories, letters
and other items. For most
items, the database also provides a list of libraries
that hold the journal, and full text is available for some as well.
Business Source Premier: Citations
to articles in hundreds of business periodicals with links to
the full text of over 60%
of the articles that a search will find.
Business
& Industry: Broad-based business
information at an international level; includes 60% full-text coverage.
Facts
on File (Facts.com): Events, issues, statistics, people.
Coverage of the last 20 years; full text.
Lexis-Nexis
Academic: Provides
access to a wide range of news, business, legal, and reference information.
Various portions of the database are updated daily and most information is full
text.
Newspaper
Source:
Indexes and abstracts articles from 27 newspapers. It has full text.
Sirs Researcher: Full-text articles from journals, magazines,
newspapers and government publications. Covers
social, scientific, political, economic, historic issues.
World
Almanac and Book of Facts (Facts.com): Up-to date information, full text.
The
Gateway to Information: A
massive multi-subject guide to books (generally reference), periodical indexes
and abstracts, both hard copy and online, and reviewed websites.
The link to the Gateway is on the Libraries’ homepage.
A Few Tips: The reference collection:
What you need may be in a reference book. Ask the librarian before you waste a lot of time doing
unproductive searches on the Internet. Libraries have many sources of statistical and factual information
in hard copy and online which are updated annually.
The Internet as an Information Resource:
The Internet is virtually unregulated: anyone can have a web page and can publish anything he wishes. And that means that a Web author can perpetuate the most outrageous misinformation imaginable. It is not necessarily true or accurate just because it is on the Internet. If you don’t want to spend huge portions of your time evaluating web sites, find a source of reviewed sites. One source of these is The Gateway to Information; another is the Libraries’ page of reference resources. To get there, click the link that says Reference on the left side of the Libraries’ Homepage. The links on the next page are all to pages that list hundreds of reviewed Internet resources.
Search Engines:
The best search engine in the world is the one that you know how to use. Most of them have an advanced
search
capacity which most people never bother to look at.
Using
all available resources:
Use your public library card to access the OPLIN databases using this URL:
Select
your public library from the list in the window at the top of the page and enter
your card number in the space provided. Select
your database from the list using the window at the top of the page.
02/12/03