Intellectual Heritage II: The Common Good (Prof. Stone)

For your IRJ assignments, you are asked to provide a link to each resource that you've found.  You might be wondering why this matters and how to know what kind of link to provide. What Prof. Stone wants is to be able to see what you were looking at, in order to verify that it exists and matches your description.  You aren't writing a research paper, so a fully formatted citation in MLA or APA style isn't necessary, but what should you provide instead?

The boxes below will help you make sure that the links you include on your assignment will successfully enable Prof. Stone to view the resources you've found.

Keeping track of these links will also help you get back to the items, in the event that you need to consult one later to complete an assignment.  This is an excellent habit to cultivate, and will help you down the road when you're gathering multiple resources to support longer assignments like research papers.

Although you can search for them all in one place, the library's digital resources actually live in many different places.  We subscribe to over a thousand databases and our catalog also links out to material the is freely available on the internet.  So, depending on what type of resource you select, you may end up viewing the resource on a specific platform that has unique characteristics.

In many cases, you will be viewing ebooks or electronic articles in one of our subscription databases.  Most, but not all, of those databases will include a tool to help you link to the item in a way that identifies you as a Temple University user (i.e. someone who has access to the resource through the institution's subscription.)  It's important to use these special "permalinks" rather than the URL in the browser bar, so that when Prof. Hana clicks on it she will be routed through Temple's access point and will be able to view the same thing that you viewed.

Where exactly the permalink tool lives, and what exactly the permalink tool looks like, varies from platform to platform.  The good news is that many of our databases belong to one of three major companies, and within each company, there is some consistency to the look and feel of their databases.  Check out the examples below to see where to find permalinks in databases from ProQuest, EBSCOHost, and Gale.

But what do you do if there's no permalink tool?  Don't panic!  You can always use a link to the library catalog record instead (see the box below), or you may see another type of link called a DOI, which stands for Digital Object identifier.  Either of this is an acceptable alternative for your assignment.

An example of a permalink in a Gale database:

An example from a Proquest Database:

An example from an EBSCOHost Database:

It makes perfect sense to link to digital things that are accessed online, but how to you link to something like a physical book?  The simplest way to communicate the necessary information is by linking to the catalog record.

Here's what to do if the resource you found is a physical item (i.e. a book on the shelves in the library):

Step 1: Run a search in the library catalog

Step 2: Select the title you're interested in, and click on the title to view the full catalog record

Step 3: Copy the URL directly from the browser bar