Nudge? Push? Shove? Getting Students to the Best Resources: EWU Research Guides, Canvas or Other Online Guides

EWU Research Guides

EWU Libraries has its own CMS designed for libraries for creating customizable web guides. This page is an example of one of our Research Guides.

Other examples:

• http://research.ewu.edu/modernphilosophy -- Dr. Decker's Philosophy 321: Modern Philosophy
• http://research.ewu.edu/hons10102 -- Dr. Macmullan's Honors 101 class
• http://research.ewu.edu/spanish -- for Spanish classes
• http://research.ewu.edu/engl408 -- for English 408: The Composition Process

It is easy to access existing content the librarians and other faculty have created and modify it to your own needs. You can create links to resources, explanatory text, embed videos, create surveys, and more. Or if you would prefer not to design it yourself but simply offer suggestions, your liaison librarian would be happy to create a guide for your class.

The advantages of using this CMS for class guides are:

1. You can take content others have already created and modify it to suit your needs, or take it as is. The librarians have already created lots of lists of useful resources by discipline, along with "how to" guides. You can also see what other librarians from across the globe have designed for specific disciplines and borrow their content (with their permission, of course).
2. This CMS is specifically designed for librarians, so while it offers lots of bells and whistles, it's easy to use. And it's designed to highlight library resources.
3. Because it isn't tied to Canvas, students outside of your class can benefit from your guide. But if you did want to lock down the page, you can password-protect your guide.

Contact Ielleen to have an account created for you.

Other Online Guides

But you certainly do not have to use the EWU Research Guides to push the best resources to your students. The main hiccup for adding links to library databases is to use the correct URL. If you are creating online guides in Canvas or wherever, make sure that you copy/paste the entire URL of the database from the library’s A-Z list. It needs to have proxy server info at the beginning: https://ezproxy.library.ewu.edu/login?url=[direct URL for the database] for off-campus access.

This is also true if you want to add a link to a specific article from one of the library's databases. Simply posting the PDF of the article on your Canvas site would violate copyright! What you need to do is provide the link to the article that sends the student to the database to pick up the article. The links in EBSCOhost databases already include the proxy server URL, but the other databases tend not to include it. You'll need to copy/paste this URL:

https://ezproxy.library.ewu.edu/login?url=

Then copy/paste the direct, persistent URL for the article after the =.

If you cannot locate the persistent URL, contact your librarian and we'll figure it out. (Each database calls it something slightly different or has it hidden in different spots.)