If you have searched the Library website but cannot find the resource you are looking for, there are a number of other places you can try.
Lean Library is a browser extension that works with our University of Lincoln Library systems and will alert you via a pop-up message if you come across a resource that the Library can give you access to, including articles, ebooks, and other subscriptions. Lean Library will also identify if a resource is available for free through Open Access. There are other Open Access browser plugins, which you can use alongside Lean Library to enhance your searching on the internet.
LibKey Nomad is another browser extension which can help you identify quickly when an online article is available from the Library. It provides links to full-text content held by the Library from publisher websites, Wikipedia and PubMed.
Many resources including journal articles, books and theses are now available via Open Access (OA). If a resource is OA you will not be charged to access the full text. There are a number of useful places you can search for OA resources.
Access to research is an initiative that provides free access to over 30 million academic articles covering fields such as art, architecture, biological sciences, engineering, environmental science, health, history, journalism, languages, politics, philosophy, physics, religion, social sciences, and mathematics.
Base is a multi-disciplinary search engine for academic web resources, that indexes a wide array of scholarly materials, including journals, institutional repositories, and digital collections, as well as scientific publications.
CORE is the world’s largest collection of open access research papers.
Directory of Open Access Books provides access to academic a wide variety of peer-reviewed OA books.
Directory of Open Access Journals allows access to full text, peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journals.
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across a wide range of publishing formats and disciplines. It provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature, including articles, theses, books, abstracts, and court opinions. While Google Scholar itself is free to use and does index many OA articles and books, not all content found through Google Scholar is Open Access.
Google Books allows you to search the full text of books and magazines that have been scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database. Although you can read some books in their entirety on Google Books, many will only offer a preview or snippets due to copyright restrictions.
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free and Borrowable Books is a non-profit digital library that offers free universal access to a wealth of digitized materials.
Project Gutenberg is pioneering digital library that offers over 70,000 free ebooks, focusing on older literary works for which US copyright has expired.
The British Newspaper Archive is a vast digital collection of historical newspapers from the UK and Ireland. It offers millions of digitised pages dating back to the 1700s, from a wide range of national, regional, and local newspapers.
EThOS is a searchable index of UK theses with full text available to order. Note that following the cyberattack on the British Library, EThOS is currently unavailable. You can search for doctoral theses in the main British Library catalogue or download a copy of the EThOS metadata in spreadsheet format.
DART Europe E-Theses Portal is a free service that allows you to search for research theses from European universities.
Open Access Dissertations & Theses is a free service that allows you to search for electronic theses and dissertations from around the world.
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) is a free service that allows you to search for electronic theses and dissertations from around the world.
Institutional repositories are digital collections where academic institutions such as universities store and preserve their community’s scholarly work. They provide OA to research outputs such as journal articles, making them freely available online to anyone, anywhere. You can find them on university websites (usually on the library pages). If you are searching for a journal article and know the institution the author works at, it would be worth searching their institutional repository. Lean Library as well as other Open Access browser plugins also search institutional repositories for OA resources.
If you are registered with Wellbeing and have a PASS plan then you may be entitled to access the RNIB Bookshare scheme. This scheme provides free online access to more than 936,000 books from over 1,000 publishers.
If you have tried all the options above to access a resource online and you still cannot find it, you may be able to visit another library to find the item you need. Alternatively, you can request a copy via the inter-library loans service, and they may be able to source it for you.
