Transitions

There is a general trend in libraries to move towards digital resources, particularly within journal articles. It is often cost-effective for us so we can provide you with more titles, and it is also more convenient to have full text access from any computer in the world.


One concern that recently arose prompted this post. The concern was traditionally some professors require students to browse tables of contents of recent issues of scholarly journals to pick a paper topic so they are finding out what's going on in the current scholarly dialog. With print, you just opened up an issue with a recent date. Online, the databases are designed to help more with subject searching than browsing. But it is possible and usually very easy to do!

Start with our Periodicals A-to-Z List and look for the journal title that was recommended, for example Personality and Individual Differences. You will see we have full text access to this journal through the Science Direct database from 1995 to present. Click on the Science Direct link. You will then have the option to select which volume and issue you want, and will be able to read all of the titles for that issue, just like a traditional table of contents!

Each database vendor may offer slightly different options, but this is pretty similar throughout our database offerings.

If you have any questions, please contact any librarian (particularly me, Mary Broussard) and we'll be happy to help further!