Distance Education

Online articles are awfully convenient and certainly a timesaver for distance students, but finding online articles is not always as straightforward as we would like. That’s why the University of Iowa’s InfoLink system is so useful.

Each copyright holder needs to grant permission for different databases or providers to make their article available online and there is no single source that covers all online articles. If you search a database like Academic Search Elite for articles on a topic, you’ll find citations to articles on your topic. Some of those citations will have obvious links to online versions of their articles and some will not.

Each University of Iowa database – Academic Search Elite, ERIC, ABI-Inform, Social Work Abstracts, any of the others – is connected to the InfoLink system and will have a small yellow InfoLink button by the citation for each article. If you click the InfoLink button, a separate window will open up and either tell you that the article is not available online or give you links to where the online article is available -whether it’s in the database you searched or not.

If the article is available online, you’ll see one or more links to different sources. Each provider of online articles does things a little differently, so clicking the links might take you right to the article or might take you to a page for that journal where you’ll need to choose the volume and issue for the article you want.

If your article is NOT available online, InfoLink will give you a link to the Article Request form. Use that to ask for a copy. We will first see if it is on our shelves in print and send a scanned copy to you electronically. If the article you want is not on our shelves, we’ll automatically request a copy from another library through InterLibrary Loan and deliver a scanned copy to you electronically.

With InfoLink, you don’t need to worry about where or how the article is available, you just need to know that you want it.

It is not a perfect system, but it can save you a lot of time and make those articles that are available online a lot easier to find. If you have any trouble finding articles or linking to online articles, contact me.

Dan the Librarian

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 10:07 am and is filed under Find Articles, Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.