Doorway to the world

I'v mentioned before that your Rodney Library card is not just about the physical books and other items you can find within the confines of the Rodney Libraries buildings. This week I want to introduce you to another one of the fantastic resources that we make available to you.

The database I want to highlight this week is the Australia/New Zealand Reference Centre which is hosted by EBSCO. For a magazine and newspaper junkie such as myself this is heaven in a library card. This site will give you access to the full text of articles from over 240 (at last count) magazines, newspapers, industry journals and newswires, and has details of what is inside each edition of nearly 400 periodicals in total. As suggested by the title, there is an Australian and Kiwi emphasis but there are magazines from further afield (e.g. United States of America and South Africa). Check out this list of everything available at the site.

This is a fantastic way to track down an article that you can remember reading, but can't remember exactly where you saw it. In a lot of cases, once you track it down you can read it on screen immediately (that what we call fulltext). In other cases the site can provide you with details of what magazine it was in, what month or edition, and even the page number. You can then check the Rodney Library catalogue as heaps of the magazines we have on our shelves are covered by EBSCO (which is a quicker way to refer to it).

So how do you access it. Simple! Go to the Rodney Libraries web page and click on the e-resources button/option. This will bring up the list of databases available to you. Scroll down to either Newspapers and Magazines or New Zealand and click on Australia/NZ Reference Centre. A screen will come up with two boxes, one asking you for your library card number and the other asking for your PIN. Once you have entered these correctly and pressed Go, the search screen for EBSCO will appear.

Oh and did I mention that you can do this from home.
Oh and did I mention that this is FREE to all Rodney Library card holders.

If you would like a demo of how this works, please ask next time you are in the library.