Friday, December 2, 2011

Oxford - journals, reference, scholarship

Still working with the idea of targetted browsing, and now looking at some specific sites. I'll start with the Oxford sites. These are subscription sites (i.e. the library pays for them), so you need a university username and password.
Oxford journals - allows you to browse journals by subject. And for each journal you can view the current issue - abstract and full-text; you can browse the archive, and you can search.
Oxford reference online. The law section includes dictionaries and companions, and covers Australian, English and American law, international law and legal history. You also have the option to explore other subject areas.
Oxford scholarship online law - includes monographs, with the option to browse or search within each book. You can search or browse other subjects too.
You can register for a personal Oxford account, with which you can set up alert services, including advance access. I tested this with a journal table of contents alert, and sure enough, the emails turn up in my in-box. But the links within the email bypass the university's ezyproxy username/password process, so I can't directly access the full text. So, I know there is new material out there, but to get it, I need to access the journal via the e-journals list (or the Oxford journals site, or the catalogue). Not hard, just a bit confusing.
One last word about the E-book/E-journal's electronic collections. We don't always subscribe to every title in a collection. Hopefully it's obvious, sometimes it's not. So, you might know that there is useful material out there, but to get it, you might need a Plan B (search the library catalogue) or a Plan C (BorrowDirect) or a Plan D (the document delivery service). Or you could just ask!

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