Welcome to JBU! As a JBU student, you have access to millions of journal articles, ebooks, and other academic resources through the JBU Library, as well as the assistance of research professionals and writing consultants who want to help you succeed. To be ready to make the most of these resources throughout your JBU career, we encourage you to complete the following tasks.
You will need to be a regular visitor to JBU Library website in order to complete your coursework, so go ahead and bookmark the website in your web browser so that it’s always just a click away. While you’re at it, explore the different sections of the website to familiarize yourself with the research tools and library resources that are available to you as a JBU student. Look under Databases to find the library resources that are most relevant to your particular area of study, under Research Help for suggestions and links for your research process, and Services to read more about the ways the library supports distance students. You can explore our electronic databases by logging in with your JBU username and password. If you have questions about the website or the library, please let us know! We value your feedback about how we can better help you find the information you need.
JBU is a part of a network with other academic libraries across the state of Arkansas and beyond that allow our students to check out books from our partner schools. If you live somewhere where you can conveniently visit one of the Arkansas libraries on this list or one of the Christian colleges or seminaries on this list, we encourage you to sign up for an ARKLink card.
ILLiad is the system that lets you request articles, books, and other materials that aren’t available in JBU’s electronic resources. We will borrow materials from other libraries in order to make them available to you. Once you’ve set up your ILLiad account, any time you see a link that says “Request by Interlibrary Loan” in one of our databases, you can simply click on that link, log in, and submit your request, and we will go to work obtaining that article for you. Articles will be delivered digitally and usually arrive in 1-3 days; books must be sent by mail. If you are a distance student, you can also use ILLiad to request digital document delivery of chapters or articles from books and journals in the JBU Library.
You can login to ILLiad using your JBU username and password. The first time you login, you will be asked to complete a registration form. You can find your ID Number on your JBU ID card or by looking at your profile on Eaglenet.
Google Scholar is a specialized version of Google that limits its results to scholarly literature. It can be a valuable supplement to searching in library databases for scholarly sources, but it often does not provide free access to the full text – instead it links to publishers’ websites where you are prompted to pay to read the articles. If you configure Google Scholar on your computer to display links to the JBU library by following the instructions here, you will be able to access the full text of articles by following the link that will appear in your Google Scholar results. (If we don’t have full text of articles you find in Google Scholar, you can use your ILLiad account to request them by Interlibrary Loan.)
Zotero is a free, open-source citation manager that helps you collect and organize your sources and format the bibliographic information for your academic work. It is a good practice to collect this information as you go about your research, so that you don’t have to stress about your works cited page right before the paper is due or, worse yet, run the risk of accidentally committing plagiarism because you didn’t keep good records of where you got your ideas. If you just want a quick tool for creating a bibliography for a single paper, ZoteroBib is a user-friendly option. Links to other citation tools are available on the Writing Center Eaglenet page.
Note Well: No citation manager is perfect. You should familiarize yourself with whatever citation system your instructor asks you to use so that you can check the generated citations for accuracy before you turn in your assignment.
If you have completed these steps, you are well on your way to being a library power user. If you have any questions about any of the items on this list or any of the services the library offers, please let us know. We are here to help you.