Library E-Resources – Your Global Companion

Mrs Hazel Loh :: ktvoo@ntu.edu.sg
Head, Digital Resources Division

“Prof Tan from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences settles down comfortably in his hotel room in San Francisco after dinner. He turns on his laptop and looks through the presentation that he is delivering at a conference the very next day.

Towards the end, he realizes that he has inadvertently omitted the citation for an important article that he made reference to from the database ‘Web of Science’. Without hesitation, he navigates to the at NTU Library Homepage. He selects the database, authenticates using his network account, searches for the citation and copies it to his presentation. With that, he happily saves his work and proceeds to get a good night’s rest.”

The above scenario is a norm nowadays as faculty travel globally in the course of their work, be it conferences, study trips or meetings. Having access to information at one’s fingertips is achievable in this time and era for information that is free on the internet. However, fee based and scholarly e-resources are not so easily available and are primarily accessible via authentication from the Library portal.

For NTU, seamless access to these resources was made possible by the implementation of our Ezproxy in 2005. It is a vast improvement in terms of convenience and ease of use as access is anywhere, anytime as long as one has a network account and access to the internet. Before this, staff and students had access only on campus or they had to set up the Virtual Private Network (VPN) in order to access our e-resources remotely.

In addition, there are also some databases which offer email alert services. Subscribing to an alert service meant that an email is automatically generated to a user with the URL links to articles that have just been added to the database. It is a convenient way to keep track of new entries in the database.

Previously it was impossible to have direct access to articles sent through email alerts if staff or students were accessing form home or remotely. They had to log in to the database to search again for the articles. We have simplified this process by creating a proxy bookmarklet for users to do a one time installation of a plugin to their favourites on the web browser. Once they receive email alerts, they need only invoke the bookmarklet to gain authenticated access to the articles without leaving their email.

Instructions on how to install the proxy bookmarklet can be obtained from http://www.ntu.edu.sg/lib/collections/db/dbfaq.htm.

Should you have further queries regarding this, please contact the Digital Resources Division at drd@ntu.edu.sg and we will do our best to assist you.