There seems to be a bit of confusion about how to access Athens and by extension Google scholar articles. So, I figured I would make a little post about it.

Firstly, I want to stress the importance of articles in the writing of papers. Books are great, but they don’t come out every few months, and are thus often less current than articles. In fact, if you look at the essays in the essay bank <http://www.cels.bham.ac.uk/resources/Essays.htm> that got distinctions you will see that they usually use articles that were current at the time. That’s not to say a good paper can’t be written based only on books, but articles clearly help.

So then, how can one find articles? The Bham library can be used, as can your local library, but in most cases Google Scholar is best. With it, you can search tens of thousands of articles for key words in moments. To do so, simply go to <http://scholar.google.com/schhp?tab=ws> and type in your key words. You will be given a list of articles, which may be too long. If it is, you might want to include another key word, limit the dates, or limit your search to the humanities. You can do this by clicking “advanced search” and filling in any information you want.

Finally, you have find an article you want, but when you click on it, you are told you don’t have access to it! Tragedy! You most likely don’t have access because you are connecting from your home computer, and thus have no right to use Bham’s subscriptions. What you have to do it set up a “Proxy”. This basically means that your computer will connect to a computer in Bham, which will in turn do the searching. As far as a website knows, you are on campus, and Bham’s subscription applies. This is fully legal and normal throughout the world. It should be noted that this is a strain on Bham’s computers, so you absolutely must not use this proxy for non-academic things. Use it only when you need it, for example, when searching for articles. I highly recommend installing a second browser which connects to Bham, and using it when you do research. I, for example, use Internet Explorer for my normal web tasks and Firefox (connected to Bham) for research. Details about how to set up a proxy are here <http://www.helpdesk.bham.ac.uk/eresources/offcampus.shtml>.

All and all, the simple act of setting up a proxy on a second browser can open up worlds of articles that will improve your essays and make life much easier for you! Give it a shot, and if you have any questions, I’m here on MASH or you can email me. Check here for my email address http://www.tatsusargent.com/links/email_address.jpg
Good luck and have fun!

-Joshua “Tatsu” Sargent (AKA Satan)

There is a link in the general blog for accessing Birmingham as well as using google scholar. It's from Jeremy Kritt on the Bham MASH Korean side.