Normal Hours of Telephone Service
- Monday 8 - 8
- Tuesday 8 - 8
- Wednesday 8 - 8
- Thursday 8 - 8
- Friday 9 - 5
- Saturday 9:30 - 1
- Sunday Closed
- Closed all University Holidays
The New OCLS Homepage
You are viewing an update of the Off Campus Library Services (OCLS) home page that has been in place for over a decade. Many courses direct students and faculty to start at the home page to discover articles, books, tutorials and videos. For this reason, the links to major category headings such as "Key Links" or "Article Databases" remain the same.
Please offer your thoughts about the new OCLS home page, and suggestions for new content that will better meet your research needs. If you want to compare the new site with the old, you can still use the old home page.
What OCLS Offers
Off Campus Library Services (OCLS) is your online library, and the OCLS team provides you with journal articles and books, assists you with library technology, counsels your regarding APA, and guides your research efforts.
Most of the library resources require username and password authentication. There are now two options for proving you are a member of the IWU community:
- use your firstname.lastname and portal password to log in to the databases, or,
- use your lastname and a 14-digit library access number.
If you are having problems with logging-in to a database, please use the contact information at the top of this page to reach the OCLS staff. For your security, ID numbers and other private correspondence is only sent to your IWU email account.
Book Widgets
Jackson Library Catalog
The catalog is your link to hundreds of thousands of printed and electronic books. Most printed books can be mailed to your home -- use the "Request" link to initiate shipping. E-books can be viewed on your computer using your web browser -- click on the link under "Connect to".
Google Books
Google has digitized millions of books, making Google Books a good tool for finding the source of a quotation. Google Books tend to be older titles, so the library is a better source for academic research.
OCLS Embedded Librarians
If you are in GEN111, PSY155, ENG140, or ENG141, then you may have a librarian in your Learning Studio course environment. The OCLS discussion forum shall either appear under "Course Home" or in the "Course Forum" sub-menu.
The Good Book Today
Speed Up Your Research
1. Review Your Requirements
Most assignment instructions consume more than a page of background information, but the description of what needs to be delivered usually is found in one paragraph. At the start of each workshop read the assignments. Judge how much time each assignment will consume. Contact the instructor if the requirements are unclear.
If you are assigned to use library sources, note how many you are expected to use. Many assignments require scholarly academic sources, and some advanced classes rely on peer reviewed journals.
2. Initial Research
Start your initial research in the first few days of the workshop . In your initial database search, put words or phrases which express different concepts in different search boxes. Enclose any phrases in quotation marks to reduce the amount of irrelevant material you retrieve. Use the checkbox limiters such as "Full Text" or "Scholarly/Peer Reviewed" to refine your results.
To obtain more relevant results, look at the useful results you have found and note the subject terms which were assigned by the database indexers. Often replacing the phrase used in your initial search with an appropriate subject heading will uncover dozens of useful articles.
Most academic assignments require students read several sources and then combine the facts and viewpoints to support a reasoned conclusion. For example, relevant articles on your workplace may not exist, but articles probably exist on similar workplaces. The experience of others in comparable workplaces can be used as examples to support your recommendations in an assignment.
At this point, contact your librarians or your instructor if you are having difficulty finding sources. Use the contact information at the top of this page to reach an OCLS librarian.
Documenting Your Research
Many databases gernerate a rough version of each article's APA reference. Select and copy each reference, then paste the reference on your reference page as you do your research. Harvesting a machine-generated APA reference should eliminate the errors that accrue from taking notes and then re-typing the reference. Generated references are often flawed, and must be checked for accuracy before a paper is submitted.
Comments
Your comments are recorded and reviewed to ensure that our team is providing quality service. The following quote came from the IWU community:
