Thursday 29 September 2011

Accessing electronic resources and e-books

Following up from chatting about passwords, I'll briefly talk about how to access electronic resources via the library website - and e-books  The library pays a lot of money to purchase licences for electronic resources.  These resources provide access to bibliographic data and full-text for journal articles, newspaper articles, books, company, market sector and country reports and so on.  Our licences restrict who can see the material, so we have to use usernames and passwords.

Electronic Resources
On campus, go to the e-library page on the library website.  Go to the subscribed databases section and look at the instructions for each resource. 

Off-campus, access to most resources is through EBSCOHost Integrated Search (but here, I'll call it EBSCO)

You should be able to access EBSCO from the search box on the library home page, the advanced search page or the e-library page where you access individual databases.  If you are off-campus, you will need to login with your student number and date of birth, in format dd/mm/yyyy 

If you try to login to EBSCO from elsewhere, say for example, after searching for EBSCO on Google, it is possible that the EBSCO page won’t recognise your DBS login.  In this regard any error message that you see is important.  If you see error code 102, it means you are entering the wrong DBS username or password.  If you see error code 101, this means that the login page is not primed to accept DBS usernames and passwords, and therefore somehow, you've done something wrong!  If you see another error code, contact the library.

If you access EBSCO correctly, you will see the following on the login page:

Dublin Business School

Login with your student number and date of birth (in format dd/mm/yyyy). If you cannot login, please contact the library

If you do not see this on the login page, you will not be able to login to EBSCO


E-Books,
We purchase the vast majority of our e-books through Dawsonera.  On-campus you don't need a login  to see them.  Off-campus you will need a username and password.  Usernames and passwords have changed over time.  If you are new to DBS your username is your student number and your password is your date of birth in format dd/mm/yyyy (we try, though sometimes fail, to be consistent!).

There are two ways of finding out what e-books you can access. You can use the search/browse facilites on Dawsonera, or you search the library's online catalogue.  On the catalogue click the advanced button.  The third search box you see has the title 'Media type'.  In the dropdown menu, tick  the box next to E-books. In the search-term box, type your search-terms and away you go.

There is another way to access electronic resources, but I'm not going to write about that right now, other than to say that it's called Athens and you can look for details on the library blog or the e-library webpage (or even the next post down).   

No comments: