Databases: Databases for history include subject-specific collections such as AM Explorer, The Bibliography of British and Irish History and The Times Digital Archive, as well as multidisciplinary resources like Humanities Source, ProQuest Central, Project MUSE, JSTOR and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. All can be accessed individually from our A-Z Databases site, and some (mostly the multidisciplinary resources) are automatically included in WorldCat searches.
Ebooks: Although the Library provides access to many thousands of ebooks, one collection particularly relevant to history, and containing over 350,000 digitised texts spanning the 15th to the 19th centuries, is JISC Historical Texts. JISC Historical Texts is accessed via our A-Z Databases site and is not searchable via WorldCat.
Websites: The Library uses the social bookmarking tool Diigo to recommend useful websites. This is the link to our recommendations for history.
Images: If you are looking for copyright-compliant images to use in your assignments check out our advice here.
Digimap is an online mapping resource. Access is normally restricted to archaeology students, and any other students who identify a specific need for it and request access. If you are studying on a programme which requires you to use Digimap you will be informed about the resource, and how to access it, by your tutor. Digimap is also listed on our Databases A-Z page.
Open access means an item is free to view (usually online) and there are no paywalls or subscription fees. An increasing number of open access resources are being made available to support academic study, including platforms such as Project Gutenberg (older books), the Directory of Open Access Books (contemporary books), CORE (research articles), the Directory of Open Access Journals (contemporary journals), EThOS (theses), The Bielefield Academic Search Engine (BASE) (research articles) Europe PubMed Central (life sciences literature) and Open Access Theses and Dissertations (theses and dissertations).
All of these and more can be accessed from our A-Z Databases site (click on All Database Types and select Open Access).
There are also a variety of discovery plugins you can use to find open access resources. The Unpaywall browser plugin flags up whether an open access version of an article is available direct from the article’s landing page. You can also use Open Access Button - a plugin (or web interface) that lets you search for a freely available version of a particular article.
Most databases and ebooks can be accessed off campus. However, in order for the various online platforms to recognise you as a BGU student, and prompt you to login with your BGU credentials, it is important to access them via WorldCat or A-Z Databases. If you don't do this, and instead use a search engine to try to access a database, you won't be recognised as a BGU student and may miss out on content you would otherwise be entitled to view.
If you are looking for journal articles, one way to avoid this is to install the LibKey Nomad browser extension (installation instructions are here). Once installed, if you are off-campus and using search engines to look for articles it will display an onscreen alert - like the one below - if you have access to a particular article.
