Spotlight on Reference

Did you know that if you wanted to read the article about Georges Remi, author of the popular Tintin books, that appeared in the New Yorker earlier this year, you could see it with just a few clicks on your computer? It’s very simple to find magazine articles in iConn--the State’s digital reference library. Here’s an example:

Starting at the Essex Library homepage, click on iConn/ReQuest. If you’re searching from home, have your Library card handy and type in the barcode number in the window provided. This allows you to make use of all the databases that iConn offers. Once you’ve submitted your barcode number, you’ll navigate to the search page for iConn.
Click on the window that says “Select iConn Resources.” Although the New Yorker is available through most of the magazine databases, click on Academic OneFile.
Next, click on “Publication Search.”
Type “New Yorker” (without the quotation marks) in the Find window and click “Search.”
The next screen will tell you some facts and figures about the New Yorker in this database including the information that the articles in the New Yorker are indexed back to January 3, 1977 and that full-text articles from the magazine are available from the January 14, 2002 issue to the present. If you look up an indexed article, you will be provided with its bibliographic information including: title, author, issue date and page numbers. If you want to see the full text of an indexed article, take down the bibliographic information provided and we’ll obtain it for you through the Library’s inter-library loan service.
To continue to the Tintin article, click on the live New Yorker link under “Publication Title.” In the next window, type Tintin in the search window and be sure the “within this publication” window is checked, then click go. You might notice that each New Yorker issue is listed below on the search page. If you’re interested in reading the whole magazine of any given issue, you can click on the issue date there and read each article in order.
The link to the article, titled: A Boy's World: Georges Remi and his Tintin comic books by Anthony Lane appears on this next page; simply click the link to see the full article.
iConn provides numerous tools on this page. You can print the article, e-mail it to yourself or a friend, download it to your computer by clicking on one of the buttons on the right. You can also have the article translated into: French, Spanish, German, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian and simplified Chinese. Another marvelous tool that iConn provides on these pages are the RSS feeds for either a journal or subject alert which means iConn will alert you with an RSS feed or an e-mail every time a new issue of a journal or magazine or when an article on your selected subject is entered into the database. With this tool, you could have an e-mail sent to you every time an article on Tintin appears in any of the magazines or journals in that particular database.