Background about our e.resources

The State Library of WA has a growing number of e.resources available for you.  The majority of these are online databases that provide a means for searching a large number of published magazines, newspapers, journals, periodicals or serials for articles of interest to you.

We have also begun to purchase e.books, these are full copies of physical books that can be viewed online.

Bibliographic Databases

Sometimes these online databases are providing only a index or finding aide to locate articles that are about the topic area you are interested in.  The will give you a listing of articles and a brief description (referred to as an abstract) and tell you which magazine, newspaper or journal the articles appear in.

In these cases there will often be a link to search for the title of this publication in our library catalogue.  It may direct you to our catalogue where you will be able to find out the floor and shelf location of the publication so you can ge the physical copy of the article.

Bibliographic Databases to Full-text

Many of our online bibiliographic database providers are now delivering full-text online versions of the articles or books they are indexing. That means that once you have your list of relevant articles about your subject you can link to the actual online version of the article within the publication.

The online database software will allow you to either print, email or save to your personal storage device an article or a listing of articles and abstracts you have found.

Getting access to our e.resources?

These commercial online database providers are a great bonus as they bring together many individual databases produced by libraries or other research organisations and make them searchable. These 'aggregated' databases are purchased by the State Library of WA on an annual license fee basis.

The majority of the licenses only allow for access from within the State Library of WA building. However we do have a number of online databases that you can get access to from home through your public library membership.

See the following pages for:

• A guide to our Indigenous e.resources
• Databases from home
  
• All State Library of WA e.resources and e.books