If it was published after 1997, the Get Text button should link you directly to it.

If it was published before 1997, you may still wish to search for the title or author in Dissertations and Theses, since complete copies of a few older dissertations are available.

If it is not, you can try requesting via Document Delivery Services ILLiad system, but they may have trouble getting it - many dissertations have not been published, and if the only copy available is the original copy, the library that owns it may be reluctant to lend it out.

Not every citation in MLA is to an article, though. Books and book chapters are also indexed.

Books are easy to pick out:

Chapters from books are also indexed, with the part after the chapter title beginning with In...

To find out if the library owns the book, use the Get Text button and follow the link labeled UNLV Library Catalog. This will automatically run a catalog search for the book’s title or ISBN. A new window should open with the catalog record for the book, which tells you where to find it on the shelf in the library.

If the book is not found, use the LINK+ button in the library catalog to check for copies available for delivery. LINK+ is a network of Nevada and California libraries that delivers books to requesters in 2 -5 days.

If the book you want is available from a LINK+ library, use the Request this Item link to have a copy delivered to the circulation desk at UNLV Libraries for you.

If not found in LINK+, the book may be available from another library through Document Delivery Services.

DDS interlibrary loan requests can take a week or more since the books are sent in the mail between libraries. Requests for book chapters or articles can arrive much faster since they are delivered online directly to you.

Most books and articles and some dissertations can be found even when there's no link to an online copy.

Remember that the Get Text button is there to automate this process!!

This button opens a new browser window, so if you use a pop-up blocker, be sure to set the MLA page as an allowed exception.

When the full text of a cited article or dissertation is available online, the Get Text button should link you directly to it.

This page describes what to do when the Get Text button does not link you to the cited article, book or dissertation.

Here is a citation to a journal article from MLA:

If UNLV Libraries cannot link you to this article online, you'll see instead a helpful menu listing other ways to get to this article.

The UNLV Library Catalog link will open a new window with a search for the journal's name or ISSN number.

If it tells you the call number of the journal, you can come to UNLV Libraries and read the article in the print copy.

If it says "no matches found," then UNLV does not subscribe to the journal, so you can request it from Document Delivery Services. They will try to get a copy from another library and send you a link to a scan of the article within a week in most cases.

You can create a username and password for Document Delivery Services using their ILLiad system. When you follow the Get Text link to Doc Delivery Services and enter your ILLiad username and password, you'll see that the information from the citation in MLA has been copied into the request form automatically. All you need to do is press the submit button to request a copy.

You'll receive an e-mail when the article is available for you to view online, usually within a few days.

What if it's not an article? See the next entry on books and book chapters!

This year's theme is "Hit the jackpot: successful experimentation and innovation in instruction."

Traditional 75 minutes sessions, panels or workshops, 7 minute Pecha Kucha presentations, and creative alternative organized activities are all welcome.

Complete and submit proposals at http://www.library.unlv.edu/conferences/loexw/proposals.html by Nov 30, 2007.
Submitters will be notified of the results by January 30, 2008.

The city of Las Vegas sets the stage for this conference, hosted at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The place suggests the following conference sub-themes offered to program proposers as food for thought, not as round holes to force the square peg of a program into. Alignment with conference themes is less important than innovative and compelling proposal content.
Games power this city of lights- blackjack, craps, poker and the ever present slot machines. Games are powerful microcosms representing the efforts of individuals to find the winning balance of competition and teamwork in their study, work, and life.
Las Vegas is characterized by rampant and frequently unrestrained growth. From gritty railroad stop in the middle of the Mojave to glamorous, glittering and gourmet playground for grown-ups, Las Vegas exemplifies transformation, renewal, entrepreneurship and new ways of doing business. Librarians and educators can learn from this carefree take on the historical, this easy urge to implode the old ways and take a gamble on something new.
Spectacle, feathers, fantasy, and magic rule the always packed showrooms of the Strip’s resort casinos. The elements of drama, fun, and performance are sometimes dismissed as so much fluff by educators but the power of edutainment to captivate and to generate engagement cannot be ignored.
Every roll of the dice, turn of the card, or pull on the slot machine handle involves a calculated risk. The savvy gambler manages resources in a way that recognizes the potential for a little loss, a lot of gain, and maybe some fun along the way.
Proposals are sought for the following:
Pecha Kucha (pronounced peh-chak-cha): A presentation format in which creative work can be easily and informally shown. The name derives from a Japanese term for the sound of conversation ("chit-chat"). The idea behind Pecha Kucha is to keep presentations concise, the interest level up and to have many presenters sharing their ideas within the course of one session. In the 20x20 Pecha Kucha format each presenter is allowed a slideshow of 20 images, shown for 20 seconds each. This results in a total presentation time of 6 minutes 40 seconds before the next presenter is up. NOTE: Only one presenter per Pecha Kucha proposal. The lightning talk presentation style is similar in nature. The linked guide on how to prepare a lightning talk offers good advice for the Pecha Kucha presenter.
Conference session: 75 minutes. You determine the appropriate format, degree of audience interaction and approach to questions and answers. We're selecting innovative topics that offer a measure of transferability - how might your audience members recycle or reframe your project in their own communities?
Other: Have a session in mind that doesn’t fit the mold? We’re interested in hearing about it.
Preference will be given to new, innovative, creative, untraditional, and other ventures that people called crazy until they worked. Experiments-in-progress will also be considered.

Complete and submit proposals at http://www.library.unlv.edu/conferences/loexw/proposals.html by Nov 30, 2007.

LOEX-of-the-West is not officially associated with the LOEX Clearinghouse for Library Instruction at the Eastern Michigan University Library. However, the LOEX-of-the-West conferences have followed the LOEX conference model of a limited number of attendees, promoting an atmosphere for library professionals to learn and share experiences and ideas with others.

Be aware that Wikipedia may not be the best source of information in an academic paper. If the facts you are citing can be verified in another source (such as a book, an online reference book, or a journal article, a good strategy would be to use that source instead. One reason is that the purpose of a citation is to allow your reader to examine the evidence you used, and Wikipedia changes daily. Books and online reference books usually don't change.

Of course, there are times when it is appropriate to choose and cite Wikipedia. Wikipedia records many fascinating discussions about millions of topics, and you may want to refer to those controversies in your essay. The Williams College library web site has a good discussion of when to choose Wikipedia.

To create any kind of citation fast, try BibMe. To build a bibliography slowly with a long list of sources that you plan to reuse in later projects, check out RefWorks.

The UNLV Libraries web site has more style guide info, bibliography tools, and information on academic integrity.

The brief version: In the First Person indexes all of UNLV's subscription collections as well as many freely available ones on the web; OAIster is another tool for identifying indexed digitized archival collections. History Matters at George Mason U. has some great tutorial material to help students begin to work with primary sources and letters and diaries and also supplies a good searchable index of online digital collections.

Finally, for contextual information, UNLV Libraries does not have access to digitized federal census records, but the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District makes them available for library card holders - from their home page, choose Databases A-Z and pick HeritageQuest Online.

Living in the past: Letters and Diaries Collections (PDF)

Eighteenth Century Journals II
Includes Newspapers and Periodicals, 1699-1812, from the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin and supports studies of the Eighteenth Century - including Literature, the theatre, the origins and rise of Romanticism, politics, revolution and rebellion, social issues, gender, society, religion and the influence of the press. Features many short run items and very rare materials.

Gerritsen Collection--Women's History Online, 1543-1945
This collection includes over two million full page images reflecting the evolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights from continental Europe, the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand. The Periodical Series contains complete runs of magazines and newspapers mainly from 1860-1900; the Monograph Language Series offers over 4000 books and pamphlets in English (over 2000 titles), German, French and other languages. Non-English-language books are summarized in English.

Godey's Lady's Book Parts 6 and 7
Parts 6 and 7 augment the existing collection of parts 1 – 5. Godey's Lady's Book provides information on 19th century American history including important social issues of the day and information on social history, women's issues, material culture, textile studies, and contemporary literature. These new additions complete the years 1830 through 1885. The entire collection now contains over 50,000 pages and include over 18,000 plates and illustrations.

Historical Annual Reports
A rich source for scholars in business, economics, and history, this collection of annual reports for 800 U.S. companies dating from 1884 to the present provides information on companies, including financial performance, key officers, competitors, and market trends

LexisNexis U.S. Serial Set Digital Collection
This rich historical collection of reports, documents and maps compiled under the directive of Congress, spans the years 1789 to 1969, and includes the American State Papers, Congressional reports and documents, executive agency and departmental reports ordered to be printed by Congress, 52,000 maps, and nearly 300,000 searchable illustrations. The Serial Set provides records of many facets of American life from the early 19th century onward, from farming to westward expansion, scientific exploration, politics, international relations, business, and manufacturing.

Literary Manuscripts 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds
Complete facsimile images of 190 manuscripts, the database includes first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for over 6,600 poems. Additional features include interactive essays, biographies, a palaeography section with transcriptions and alphabets, and a large selection of color images demonstrating over 320 examples of 17th and 18th century English handwriting.

Sage eReference Collection
An online collection of 47 reference titles from Sage Publications. Reference titles cover a variety of subjects including history, sociology, psychology, criminal justice, political science, communications, social work, education and business.

Theatre in Video
More than 500 hours of online streaming video of complete professional performances of more than 250 well-known plays, together with more than 100 video documentaries begins in the 1930s and progresses through the 2005.

Arts & Humanities Citation Index (choose the Cited Ref search)
Pros:
• Allows you to track which journal articles cite a particular article, and get an automatic alert when new citations are added
• Systematically searches lists of works cited for articles published in the core literature of each discipline
• Includes fancy tools that let you graph an article’s (supposed) influence for articles published in the social sciences or science (data is not collected about humanities articles, so the "impact factor" does not apply)
Cons:
• Does not index bibliographies in books - you can see if your book has been cited in articles, but citations are not indexed from monographs.
• Extremely fussy search rules – uses only author first initial or first and second initial
• Web of Knowledge tools are calibrated for use in scientific disciplines

Google Scholar
Pros:
• Includes articles from JSTOR and other major commercial collections that you can access by setting UNLV as your home institution in the preferences
• Picks up conference papers, preprints, web pages, and other “grey literature” that may not make it into standard indexes
• Includes cited references for books BUT their cited reference system only searches what’s available to Google Scholar
Cons:
• Only Google knows what’s in there and they aren’t telling
• Hard to narrow down a search to core literature in a field; try the advanced search options to limit search to broad subject area ("Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities")
• Links to books may show 1-2 pages but will not reveal the whole book

Scopus
Pros:
• easier to use than AHCI
Cons:
• limited coverage in the humanities

Citation indexes don't systematically harvest items that have been cited in book chapters and books in most disciplines. Here are a few places you can search through the full text of published books:

Booksearch x 3 runs a simultaneous search in three major searchable book collections: Amazon A9, Google Books and MSN Live Book Search. This is a keyword search so I recommend searching variants of your name in quotation marks ("priscilla finley" "finley, p.") with a keyword from your book or article title if needed.

The same strategies can be effective in ebrary and netLibrary, which search a selection of recent academic titles.

For the daily reader who wants to scan headlines and see photos, it makes sense to visit NYTimes.com to browse the day's news.

A few features like op-ed pieces and articles published between 1981 and two weeks ago are limited to Times Select subscribers. You can get free access to Times Select articles with your unlv.edu email address!

[[UPDATE 9/19/07 - Dear TimesSelect Subscriber,

We are ending TimesSelect, effective today.

The Times's Op-Ed and news columns are now available to everyone free of charge, along with Times File and News Tracker. In addition, The New York Times online Archive is now free back to 1987 for all of our readers.

Why the change?

Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free flow of New York Times reporting and analysis around the world. It will enable everyone, everywhere to read our news and opinion - as well as to share it, link to it and comment on it.

We thank you for your support of TimesSelect, and hope you continue to enjoy The New York Times in all its electronic and print forms.]]

The complete New York Times archives are also searchable through links from the UNLV Libraries web site. The Historical New York Times Archive offers PDF images of newspaper pages from 1851-2003. Magazine and book review pages are included.

To run a search that includes articles from after 2003, or if you wish to search other major metropolitan newspapers in addition to the Times, use ProQuest National Newspapers from the library web site. Full text of articles from the East Coast Late Edition is available from June 1, 1980 to the current day's paper. The New York Times Magazine and the New York Times Book Review are both available from 1997 forward and may be searched in combination with other papers or separately.

Access to the full text of articles from the New York Times is also available through Lexis Nexis Academic (1980-current) and
Factiva (most recent three months) for users accustomed to these search interfaces.

Occasionally an article or photo will be removed from the online archives as a result of a court case that limited the rights of newspapers to republish the work of certain freelancers in digital format. Citations to these articles or photos appear in the database along with a note that the content has been removed. These articles or photos are almost always available on microfilm, which you can use on the second floor of Lied Library.

Another search option is to use Google's news archive search. Direct access to articles found using this search is most often pay-per-view; however, if you have set up academic access to Times Select you can bypass the $4.95 fee for articles published after 1981. If you haven't set up Times Select or need an older article, use the citation information to locate the same article in the Historical New York Times Archive.

Pay-per-view articles from other papers that you find through the Google News Archive may also be available through one of UNLV's online newspaper collections. To find out if a particular paper is available, search for the title or city on the list of UNLV's print and online journal subscriptions, which will tell you what dates are available for each paper and link you to the online source.

To use them, log into your iGoogle account (or create one) and choose Add Stuff >>, then Add by URL (in tiny letters next to the search box on the Add Stuff page). Paste in the URLs below to try the gadgets.

UPDATE 10/23/2007: They are posted - learn more at a workshop this Thursday from 12:30-1:30. Sign up here!
Quick links to services (databases, ILLiad, my account...)
http://priscilla.finley.googlepages.com/unlvlibquik2.xml

Search UNLV Library Catalog
http://priscilla.finley.googlepages.com/unlvcat2gadget.xml

Search UNLV print and online journal list
http://priscilla.finley.googlepages.com/unlvjournalgadget.xml

Slim RSS Reader is a good choice if you want to dedicate a gadget to reading UNLV Libraries News items

MeeboMe gadget

I also played around with a MeeboMe gadget but there's no point installing it since there's no one to talk to at the other end. It will be an interesting possibility for Ask a Librarian in the future, I think.

If you try any of these out, I'd love to hear whether you think they're useful! I haven't really integrated iGoogle into my habits, but I can see how some users might appreciate having sets of tools ready to use like that.