INFORMATION AND NEWS
NEW !! EXPANDED AND IMPROVED RESOURCES FOR ALUMS : THE ATLA RELIGION DATABASE AND ATLAS E-JOURNALS NOW AVAILABLE We are now able to provide our alumni/ae with ACCESS TO THE ENTIRE ATLA RELIGION DATABASE, not just the ATLAS subset. You probably realize that ATLAS represents only the full-text portion of the information encompassed in the whole ATLA-RDB. You now have access to the entire data store, including citations for more than 1600 scholarly journals and books in religious studies, as compared to the 150+ that are at this time included in ATLAS. This data store includes more than 1.7 million records. This expanded service uses a new, more powerful and intuitive interface provided by EBSCO. This interface is considered the gold standard for database searching and document delivery, and we believe it will deliver better access to the very valuable research information in the ATLA data store. TO REACH THE NEW EBSCO LOGIN SCREEN, CLICK HERE. If you received a username and password from us since 1 January 2010, you can go on using them -- they will still be active. If you are a Union-PSCE or BTSR alum and you do not yet have an alumni/ae login, you will need to email our Reference Librarian, Paula Skreslet, to obtain the user ID and password. She will check your alumni status and then reply to your email with the necessary information. (Because this is confidential, we cannot post it here.) We intend to do some further work to tailor this interface to our needs. We also want to prepare a detailed tutorial that will instruct users in the kind of search techniques you are likely to need. So, please bear with us as we continue to work on this. For Users of The Text This Week : If you use TextWeek to prepare lectionary passages, you will have access to the ATLAS articles that they recommend. When you choose an article to read, click on one of the EBSCO links. You should be able to view the article as a PDF file. Please feel free to contact Paula Skreslet with any problems or questions. Thank you for your understanding and patience!
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A completely new capability has just been added to the version of the American Theological Library Association Serials collection known as ATLAS for Alumni/ae. This program now includes full-text searchable PDFs, allowing you to do keyword searching in the body of the article itself, not just in the bibliographic record for the article. This means you can find, for example, all of the articles published in the journal Religion and American Culture that mention the term "ecumenism." You can combine the traditional search fields, such as Journal Title, with the new full-text keyword searching to achieve this result. You can choose to download the original scan (this is usually much faster) or the complete high-resolution PDF for printing or reading online, with zoom capability and very high image quality. Also, you can highlight the term you were searching for within the text and go straight to the places in the article where the word appears, by using the PDF "search within the document" feature (click on the button showing a little pair of binoculars on the PDF toolbar). This is an amazing breakthrough in the functionality of the ATLAS program and its ability to deliver journal articles in full text.
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