Milne Library News

The New York Times now offers online access to the full text of articles from 1851 to 1922, and from 1987 to the present. From the New York Times homepage at http://www.nytimes.com/, simply enter a search in the box at the top of the page, and in the dropdown box to the right select the time period you'd like to search. This service is free to all.

Milne Library offers access to the full content of the New York Times from 1851 to 2004 to all SUNY Oneonta users. Look for the link under Databases by Name (A-Z) on the library home page. For 2004 to the present, use Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe. The advantage of the library access is that the 1923 to 1986 years are available, and that you can conduct a much more sophisticated search.

All College employees are eligible to access the databases provided for State employees at the New York State Library.  While only a small portion are available to students, employees are welcome to apply for a "P" card at the New York State Library.  For more information, check out the Faculty Services page.

Looking for articles? Your professor usually assumes you know what an article is, right? Not an Article of the Constitution or an article in the grammatical sense (a, an, the), but an article from a magazine or a journal or a newspaper. He or she does NOT want you to go to Google or Ask.com, do a quick search, and drag in the top five results – 99 times out of 100 these are not going to be articles. True, magazines like Newsweek and Atlantic Monthly put a small number of their articles on their web sites and these might show up in a Google search. Read “small  number” as the important phrase here – not the full content.

 

Basically using a web search engine like Yahoo! is a totally unreliable and inadequate way to search for articles. Especially when the library web site has exactly what your professor expects from you. Read my lips –  E.X.A.C.T.L.Y. The tools you need are called databases. These are essentially large digital holding tanks for the contents of thousands of magazines, newspapers, and scholarly journals. These are articles that were originally published in the print version of periodicals such as the New York Times or the Journal of Animal Law and Ethics. The library pays to subscribe to these using your technology fees and tuition. Think of these databases as being like HBO and Showtime – premier content, while web search engines like Google and Yahoo! are basic cable full of ads and a tremendous amount of junk, with a good show appearing only now and then.

 

All the library subscription databases can be accessed from the library home page under the heading marked “Find Articles and Databases.”  The top links under this heading are Databases (A-Z) (useful if you already know the name of the database you want to use) and Databases by Subject. Since the library subscribes to about 100 databases on a wide variety of topics, it’s helpful to use this second link to focus on those databases that are most appropriate for your topic. The remainder of the links on the library home page are to popular and highly-used databases.

 

In addition to there being many subject-specific database like America: History and Life or Science Direct or Business and Company Resource Center, there are a number of databases that include the text of articles across many subjects. One of the best is Academic Search Premiere, which is pretty much a good database to start with for most topics. You’ll find the link to this index in the list on the home page under “Find Article and Databases.”

 

Here are some tips for searching Academic Search Premiere.

 

1. Key Words: Use key words and phrases and place one concept per line in the search boxes.
2. Peer-reviewed: On the page listing the results, look for the links above the list of results -  “Academic Journals,” “Magazine,” “Newspapers” – and click on the one you need. Many professors give assignments that require you use scholarly or peer-reviewed journal articles – select the Academic Journals to limit your search to peer-reviewed.
3. Narrow the Results: On the results page, use the links on the left to narrow your set of results to a specific subject. You can always back up and select a different limiting subject.
4. Email the Article to Yourself: Instead of printing every article you might need, email articles to yourself using the link on the upper right of the page of the article you want. Go through them later and print only those you really need.
5. Find It: Some articles will be available in full-text – HTML full text or PDF full text – but some will not. Click on the “Find It” link to find out if the article is available in one of the other databases the library subscribes to.
6. Interlibrary Loan: If the “Find It” link tells you the article isn’t available anywhere else online, and it’s an important article for your research, look for the  “Request item on Interlibrary Loan” link on the “Find It” window and use this to have the library get a copy of the article from another library, delivered to you electronically.
7. Search Multiple Databases Simultaneously: Academic Search is just one of many databases made by a company call EBSCOhost. It’s kind of like Toyota making many different models of cars. To search several EBSCOhost databases at once, find the dropdown box just below the search boxes that indicates the name of the database you’re searching. Click on this to see the full list of EBSCOhost databases, and check the other databases you’d like to search.

 

As always, ask for  help at the Reference and Information Desk, call 436-2722, or email your questions to libref@oneonta.edu.