SSU Library Tech Tips   Tags: blackboard, computers, digital videos, off campus  

All of the databases available through EBSCOhost are available through one or more mobile applications that are supported by most mobile devices. 

EBSCOhost Mobile is the mobile-ready gateway to all of the EBSCOhost databases, including Academic Search Premier, CINAHL, Humanities International Complete and many others. 

EBSCO's new iPhone app is free, and offers the convenience and rich functionality that enables users to:

• Choose which databases to search
• Limit results to full text or peer reviewed
• Sort by relevance or date
• Retrieve full text results in HTML and/or PDF formats
• Save results for offline access at a later date
• Email results to self or others
• View cover flow display of results

 

It is research paper time.  You've logged into your email and opened your Word document and you are SO ready to finish this project.  But, then the unexpected happens and you've lost your file.  There are a number of ways to lose Office documents, but the good news is there are also a number of ways to recover them. 

We often see two different ways students lose their documents.

The most common is the power going out. Whether it is power to the building or one workstation - don't panic!  Usually when you restart the Office  program, your file will be available in the form of Recovered Text.  Lucky you! Office periodically saves your document in the background as you are working.  You may lose some content, but a Recovered Document trumps losing an entire paper.

We are seeing students lose documents that were opened as email attachment.  First, see my rule of thumb for working with email attachments:

• Open the email attachment
• Select the File Menu (File Menu of the Office program)
• Select Save As
• Navigate to the location you wish to save the file
• Select Save

When you are finished, attach the new file to an email if you need to work on it at home, etc.  Also, consider using a flash drive to transport files.

What happens when you open an Office document that is an email attachment?  Depending on the mail client or web browser these files don't save by default to My Documents.  Instead the files are usually saved to a Temporary Internet folder or Temp folder. These files can be tricky to find, but try this:

• Open another document in your email client/browser
• Select the File Menu
• Select Info
• Notice the Properties column on the far right
• Toward the bottom of the Properties column select Open File Location
• This should open a folder where you paper will be

If you are still stumped, stop by the reference counter and we will try to help you.

A student and I were troubleshooting an issue with the database Westlaw Campus Research.  We were motivated to solve the issue because the student is in the paralegal program and will use Westlaw frequently for legal research.

This student was working from off campus and didn't have any trouble authenticating or reaching the database.  But, an error occurred when he tried to search the database. While troubleshooting we discovered what Westlaw does & does not like.

Try these tips to get the best performance out of Westlaw:

• Update java
• Turn off the browser's pop-up blocker
• Pop-up blocker must be turned off for printing

I hope this helps!