Finding Journals in the Library

Happy New Year!

Life was simpler in the days when all of the Library's journals were shelved in one big sequence of printed volumes on the ground floor. Even if you were the sort of person who didn't like using catalogues you could see what was there and after a little time you got to know the holdings in your area pretty well. The advent of electronic access to journals has enormously increased our scientific journal holdings but at the cost of this simplicity. Electronic journals are usually part of a large publisher's package like Elesvier ScienceDirect or Blackwell Science, but they can also be embedded in "aggregator databases" like EBSCOhost and InfoTrac or they can be "one-offs" provided directly by small publishers. Sometimes we have access to the same journal through a number of these channels and the situation becomes complicated by the fact that the aggregators offer restricted access only to many of their titles, so that for example the last twelve months' issues will not be available.

If you want to know whether you have access through the Library to a journal the simplest and quickest method is to do a journal search on the catalogue. If it is not listed then it is highly unlikely that we hold it and it is not necessary to search individually through our databases. Our policy is to include all instances where we have access to a journal in order to be able to fully exploit our spending and to ensure that if we lose access through one channel that the journal is still available to you through another. Sometimes this means that you will have to examine the record quite closely to ensure that the electronic link you are following will give you the year and volume you are after -

Only in a very small number of cases are there journal titles available through the Library's subscriptions that are not listed as such on the catalogue - this is usually because of time delays in entering new packages. By all means get in touch with us if you think we should have access to a title that is not listed.