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Suppose you want to learn more about the liberal arts. Perhaps you start by looking up the topic in Wikipedia, where you learn that there are, or used to be, only seven such arts. Eager to learn more, you consult a librarian, who suggests that a more appropriate encyclopedia might be the New Catholic Encyclopedia. Your curiosity now engaged, you study the article in that encyclopedia and find a reference to The Seven Liberal Arts, a Study in Mediaeval Culture, by Paul Abelson. You look up this book in the catalog, find it in the Library, and begin reading. In that book you come across a citation to H. Parker's article, "The Seven Liberal Arts" in The English Historical Review. You'd very much like to read the article, but because it is from the late nineteenth century, it might be difficult to find. Indeed, a quick search in the Library's catalog shows that although Drew has most volumes of this journal, our print holdings are missing the 1890 volume that contains Parker's article. However, the Library does have the 1890 volume in microfilm. We also have access to it electronically through JSTOR. Which would you prefer? ( Google Scholar also retrieves a link to this article - in JSTOR.)
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Let's say, for instance, that you want to learn more about the topic of information literacy. (4) You can search the Library catalog for relevant books there. You also might search Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA), and if you do, you might find a citation to the article, " Information Literacy Program Assessment: One Small College Takes the Big Plunge."(5) Naturally, you'll want to learn whether you can get a copy of this article through the Library. How do you do this? Well, if the Library had link-resolving software(6) in place, you would be able to see while viewing the article's citation whether or not you had access to the full text. But since Drew does not have that kind of software, you can instead go to the A-Z list of electronic journals and search on the title of the journal. If you do, you will see that we have access to the relevant journal for the year in question, and the full text of the article is available for downloading. (You might also look to see whether the author has posted the article on her Web site. Apparently she has not.) Of course you can always try Google, too.
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