What is Athens?

Many of these e-resources use the Athens service to check you that you are entitled to use them. Athens authentication also enables you to use most resources off campus. Ask in the Library for your Athens login details.

Access to some resources is also controlled by UK Access Management Federation. You still use your Athens login details, but you will also need to type in University for the Creative Arts in the box where it asks for the Institution you are at.

The online resources are listed alphabetically by title when you first go in.

If you know the name of the resource you want, scroll down the list and click on the link when you find it. This will take you into the web page of that service.

You can find out which organisation or publisher provides each service and what sort of material is covered by clicking on the ' i ' button next to each title.

Brief information on usage rights is also given for image and online video resources.

The Search by Subject page shows the resources grouped together by the subjects they cover. To see the subject list, just click on the Search by Subject link at the top of the page.

Click on the subject links you are interested in to see all the online resources that the library has which are relevant to that topic.

Many of the online resources are relevant to more than one subject.

To go back to the A-Z list, click on the Search by Title link at the top of the page.

The resources that have a check box next to their titles can be cross-searched with other resources.

For each of the resources you want to search together, click into the box to select it. Then enter your keywords in the search box at the top of the screen and click Search.

The results will take 30 seconds to a minute to come up on screen. The more resources you search together, the slower the search will be.

It is not advisable to click the Select all option as you are likely to get a lot of irrelevant results. If you are going to cross-search several resources together it is best to choose ones that cover similar subjects and types of material. 

The results list will give you citation details and tell you which online resource the reference came from. Click on the title of the article in the citation to go directly to it.

If you have cross-searched several resources together you can limit the results to full text only and / or peer-review articles using the Filter by area on the top right of the search results screen.

Click into the Full text and / or Peer-reviewed check boxes to narrow the results.

Most of our online resources are available to UCA staff and students off-campus. When you click on the Access Online Resources link off-site, an Athens login box will appear.

Once you have logged in you will not need to login to most resources a second time. Some, such as Digimap and Mintel, require you to registered if you are using them off-campus.

If you are asked to enter an email address when using any of our online services, always use your UCA email address. If you use a private email address these services may not recognise you as being a member of this University.

Some resources are not available off campus either because the supplier does not permit off-site access or because it is not possible for technical reasons.