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The library provides access to a wealth of online content that you can use in your course.
Unlike coursepacks and textbooks, students are already paying for access to these materials
with their tuition. You can use quicklinks in your course that open within the d2l frame,
so that students don’t have to leave your course to access all the content.
It’s always better to link out to online content rather than downloading, saving, and
re-uploading in your course. For one thing, you want to stay on the safe side of copyright
law. Linking out respects the library’s licensing contracts with database vendors.
Also, libraries determine which journals and databases to continue subscribing to based
on usage statistics. When you use a library link in your course, each time a student clicks
on that link, it counts as a use for that journal or database. It makes it clear to
the library that the journal or database is important to continue subscribing to.
When you link to something that’s freely available on a website, you can just grab
the url from the top of the page and insert it as a quicklink in your course. This doesn’t
work with links into our databases because that content is behind our proxy server. You
had to log in to access it, so the url at the top of the page is temporary and might
not take the next user back to the same page that you’re looking at now.
You can solve this problem by using a permanent url instead. If you click on services for
faculty, you’ll find our page on linking to full-text articles. This page covers how
to find permanent urls and how to make sure they have the library’s proxy prefix so
that students are directed to log in before they access library content.
We’ll come back to this page in a minute, but let’s look at a couple of easy examples
first.
In any EBSCO database - in this case, Academic Search Complete - you can look for the button
that says “permalink.” Clicking here gives you a link that you can copy and paste as
a quicklink in your course.
Films on Demand is another easy one. On the page for any film, scroll down to the link
labeled “Title url” then copy and paste this link as a quicklink. The reason EBSCO
and Films on Demand are easy ones is that they not only give you persistent links, but
they automatically add the proxy prefix to the url for you. This character string routes
students through the library’s proxy server and prompts them to log in if they haven’t
already.
Other databases provide persistent but not proxied urls. For example, JSTOR provides
what they call a stable url, but as you can see it’s missing our proxy info. Copy that
stable url and paste it into the box on the “Linking to articles” page, then click
on “create link!” to generate a proxied url that you can use as a quicklink in your
course. In general, if you find a persistent url that doesn’t start with “stats.lib.pdx.edu”
then you need to add the proxy prefix.
Some databases require yet a third step, if they provide a digital object identifier (doi)
but not a persistent link. AnthroSource is one example. In that case, you have to build
your own permanent url that includes our proxy prefix, then the doi prefix, then the doi
that you find at the top of the article record. You can always check our page on linking to
full text to see whether the database you’re in has special instructions associated with
it.
Remember that you can always contact a librarian for help. We know that it’s not always intuitive
to figure out how to use all the different platforms that we provide access to. Keep
in mind that for students, it’s worthwhile to have all their content within the frame
of the course and for no additional cost. Thanks for watching!