Learning to use the EBSCO Religion Databases (OTA, NTA, CPLI, RPC)
How do you find articles in periodicals, or essays within collected works, or book reviews? The Morton Library offers you a variety of indexing tools for this information, in the field of religious studies. Several of them are provided to us by a publisher/vendor known as EBSCO :
OTA -- Old Testament Abstracts
NTA -- New Testament Abstracts
CPLI -- Catholic Periodical and Literature Index
RPC -- Religion and Philosophy Collection
In addition, we subscribe to several important EBSCO databases in fields outside the traditional bounds of religious studies : Academic Search Complete (an interdisciplinary colllection of over 9000 indexed journals, 6000 of them in full text) and smaller subsets of this collection, such as Education Research Complete, Humanities International Complete, and Psychology and Behavioral Sciences. This tutorial will address the EBSCO religion indexes.
Many of the articles indexed by these databases are also provided in digital full text. Users are able read scanned images of the articles they select, directly through the database.
How to connect to the EBSCO databases online
On our Library public website, choose Online Databases. Click on one of the religion databases, such as New Testament Abstracts. If you are on our campus network (in the Library, faculty offices, etc) you will be connected seamlessly to the resource you requested. If you are off campus, you will be asked to supply your user ID and password. You will see this display :
Do not enter the same user ID and password you use to login to the Morton Library catalog.
For UPSem students, staff and faculty : your network login (the one you use for our campus email system or Blackboard) should give you remote access to these resources. Don't include the UTSNT\ prefix; just use the personal name part of your network user ID (such as jane.doe or jdoe).
For students, staff and faculty of BTSR : your login will normally be the initial of your first name plus last name, such as jdoe; your password will be the last six digits of your Library barcode number, as shown on your access card. If you have trouble connecting, you may need to check with our Librarian for Academic Computing Support, to make sure your current user ID and password are entered into our proxy server. Please contact Leland Deeds at 804-278-4217 or ldeeds@upsem.edu for further information.
