Week 10: How to use and access online Journals
CONTENTS:
A number of journals to which the Robinson library subscribes offer an electronic version to everyone belonging to the University. So what? Well, this means that any student can access recent volumes of some of the most important history journals from any computer terminal on campus. So what? This means that you can:
- Read them on screen, with the ability to zoom in and out, and go fast forward or backward
- Make computerized searches for keywords or phrases
- Copy material from the PDF file and paste it into other windows applications
- Print such files out, to get xerox quality versions
So electronic journals are fantastically useful. It means that, for the relevant journals, one does not need to queue for xerox machines, wrestle with said machine, mutter bad words when your copycard expires and so on. It also means that there is, in effect, a limitless supply of the journals in question. No more searching, with increasing fury, for that vital volume which you know must be somewhere in the library!
I can tell that you are interested in learning about online journals, now. The next question is, how do you access and read them?
You need to do the following:
- First you need to read this introduction to the Acrobat reader
- Then you need to click on this link which is the
Robinson library webpage which directs you to the web pages containing electronic journals. (You should start by clicking on the
, and selecting the Arts).
- Look up an article in a PDF format. I suggest you look for one in the latest edition of the premier history journal, the Historical Journal
- When you have located an article you can either read it on screen by double clicking on the icon. This should launch the Acrobat reader and enable you to read it onscreen. Alternatively you can..
- Download the PDF file to your filespace. Do this by right-clicking the link to the PDF file. Save the file with a .pdf extension to your filespace (ie. article.pdf) which will normally be the f:\ drive. You need to include the .pdf extension so that Acrobat can read it.
- Open the Acrobat reader and open the file you have just downloaded. You should now be able to read it, zoom in on it, search the article for key words, and print it out.
Task for today's lesson: print out ONE page of any online historical journal and hand it in to the course leader.
Do not forget this lesson. Electronic journals are here to stay, and are already appearing on our departmental readling lists.
Now, when you have finished, why not visit Dr Boulton's home page?