News & Blog

Welcome to the Libraries new blog topic: Ask A Librarian Featured Questions. Our popular virtual Ask Us reference service supports the UCF community from wherever they are located. It provides options for chat and text from the UCF Libraries’ homepage in addition to phone and email support.

The most asked question on Ask Us: “How do I open this article?”

This question comes to Ask Us staff largely through our most used mode of contact, our chat feature.  

When someone clicks on an article in a result list accessed through QuickSearch, there is a link to our chat widget “Ask a Librarian Chat” below the article record.

Taking a look, we can check the left side of the page and see which link is provided.

• Find Full Text – click this button and on the next page select the link: Full text from (database name). The database should open with the article information and a PDF link, if not, you can copy and paste the article title into the database search box.
  
• PDF Full Text – click this link and it will go directly to the PDF of the article
  
• Request Item/See Options – this link indicates that this article is not available through QuickSearch. Please note that not all of our Databases are searched when using QuickSearch. Click on the link and another tab will open with links to check other options. A good one to try first is “Search for (journal name) in Publication Finder” to see if we have access to the journal and year the article is from. If so you can click on the Database link that contains the article, and search for the article title in that Database. Another option to try is: “Search for this article title in Google Scholar” sometimes it may come up and have a PDF link to the right of it. If after this you cannot access the article you can click on the link: “Request this item through interlibrary loan.”  This will bring you to the NID login and then to the auto-filled request form. ILL will access the PDF for you from another library, this usually takes 3-5 days.

Make sure to visit Ask Us to ask questions about research, library resources, services, and policies. We look forward to assisting you!

Whether you’re preparing course materials for your course or have questions about copyrighted works for your research, UCF Libraries has got you covered with a variety of services and resources to help you navigate the complexities of copyright in all your teaching & research endeavors.   

The Office of Scholarly Communication provides general information about copyright, fair use, and other copyright-related matters. In addition to our website, you can also find information on our various intellectual property research guides where we explore topics, such patents, trademarks, and copyright.   

If you have specific questions or would like to speak with a librarian about copyright, Scholarly Communication Librarian, Sarah Norris, is here to provide general information to faculty for teaching & research purposes. She is also offering online office hours for drop-in questions. You can find her current virtual office hours, as well as how to schedule an appointment here: https://library.ucf.edu/staff/norris-sarah/  

This year’s Open Access Week celebration is coming to a close. We hope that you have enjoyed following along with UCF Libraries’ blog posts, social media posts, and other activities that highlighted the Open Access (OA) movement. If you missed any of our efforts, you can always revisit them by visiting the Libraries’ blog or by checking out the Open Access Week archives in STARS, UCF’s institutional repository.

Daniel Cox is a full-time instructor in the Games and Interactive Media program as well as a part-time Ph.D. student in the Texts & Technology program here at UCF. His research interests include code pedagogy and narrative games. He looks at how people learn programming languages and tools, and then how those skills translate into creating different works. He has been focused on open access learning for interactive storytelling tools for many years.

This blog post is written by Humanities Librarian, John Venecek.

The idea of the library as a site of social justice is a long-standing interest of mine. I’ve explored this issue by developing exhibits, programming, and other events designed to shed light on social justice issues. As a subject librarian, I seek to build diverse and inclusive collections in the humanities including art, literature, Africana, and Latin American studies. I advocate for increasing the equity of and access to scholarship and I’m an active promoter of Open Education Resources (OERs) and textbook affordability initiatives. None of this is unique to me. Most librarians participate in these types of activities without considering themselves activists per se. They’re simply doing what librarians do every day: Promoting diversity, inclusion, equity, and access in the most seamless, transparent ways possible.