Linking to E-journals

E-Journals are an ideal way to provide reading materials that your students can easily access. These can be used effectively by creating links from Blackboard, but this raises several legal and technical issues.

The main service providers were contacted and asked for their recommendations about linking from Blackboard. Responses varied but in general they were happy for linking to take place, in fact many encourage it. How to create links varies with provider, some being more complex than others. The table below summarises the responses and provides links to guidelines for each supplier.

General recommendations

• To make a link easy for your students to identify, incorporate it into the following HTML Code:
  
  <a href="insert link here" target="_blank">Insert title of article or Journal here</a>
  
  This will ensure that only the text you place in the “Insert title of article or Journal here” section of the code appears on the webpage and that that text provides a link to the article or journal in question.
• If you are unsure about linking and stability try searching for the journal from the library catalogue, click onto the tab CATALOGUE you will find a URL next to the label "electronic resource". Use this to create your link. This will be a link to the journal title and users will then need to select appropriate volume and article but this encourages students to use e-journals effectively.
• If students are trying to log on to the resources from off-campus they may find that they need to sign in via Athens in order to view the content. In this case they should select the “Institutional Login” option on the Athens sign on screen and select University of the West of England. This will allow them to sign on with their user name and password.