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When you click on the UC-eLinks button on a database screen, you may be linked directly to the item you wanted. Usually, you'll find the item in a UC-eLinks frame that also contains links to the full array of UC-eLinks services, as well as Report a problem, and a Remove frame button.
By clicking on the UC-eLinks menu link, you will be able to select the full text from other vendors, if available; use Request (interlibrary loan); and see links to other services such as finding a print copy in your local catalog, Ask a Librarian, and the Copy & Paste Citation feature.
In the case of some publishers, you will be presented with the UC-eLinks window the first time you click on an article from the publisher. For subsequent articles from that same publisher, you will go directly to the full text without viewing an intervening UC-eLinks window. This occurs for the following publishers: AIP Scitation, Gale, JSTOR, Lexis-Nexis, ProQuest, Springer and Wilson.
In other instances, users will not see the citation information and a link to the UC-eLinks menu window above the full text because the publisher's site does not permit frames. (Additionally, UC-eLinks will not display in a frame for some services such as Citation Linker, campus A-Z lists, UC-eLinks in Next Generation Melvyl and others.)
If the article falls outside the "Available online" dates indicated in the Melvyl Catalog or your local campus catalog, the UC-eLinks menu will not display a link to the full text.
If your article does fall under the "Available online" dates and yet is unavailable, please use the "Report a problem with UC-eLinks" option under the "Get Help" section on the UC-eLinks menu, or contact a librarian at your campus for assistance.
If you are off campus and trying to access UC licensed materials you will need to use your campus proxy server or VPN service to access UC licensed databases and ejournals. If you are signed on to your campus proxy or VPN service and cannot get to the resources that you normally access while on campus, this indicates that you are not being recognized as a valid UC user.
If you are having difficulty logging in to your campus proxy or VPN service, you will need to check with your campus proxy or VPN support service for assistance. Please see Off-Campus Access: Questions and Answers for Users for more information about off-campus access and links to campus specific support pages.
If the article falls outside the "Available online" dates indicated in the Melvyl Catalog or local campus catalog, the article will not be available to you. If the article does fall under the "Available online" dates, please use the "Report a problem with UC-eLinks" option under the "Get Help" section on the UC-eLinks menu, or contact a librarian at your campus for assistance.
Additionally, online journals that are marked "Selected full text available …", e.g., "Selected full text available from EBSCOhost Academic Search Complete" do not include the full text of all articles under the "Available online" dates; some articles will not be "Available online" at these sites. Click the Melvyl or local library catalog link on the UC-eLinks menu to locate a print copy on your campus, or click the "Request this... " link under the "Request It" section of the UC-eLinks menu to request a copy of the article from another library.
Many publishers do not include supplementary or special issues as part of their regular online content. If these materials are online, they very often have unusual pagination or volume issue numbers. If the material is "Available online", UC-eLinks may have received incomplete or incorrect citation information (such as multiple page numbers in the start page field) that prevents UC-eLinks from creating a direct link to the item. You can get to the desired item in two ways:
If you still cannot find the article on the website, please contact a librarian at your campus or use the "Report a problem with UC-eLinks" option under the "Get Help" section on the UC-eLinks menu.
Selected full text resources do not contain cover-to-cover full text for all of the items in a specific journal title due to copyright or other issues. UC-eLinks matches on the journal title and the date range and not on individual items so you may get a selected full text link to an item that is not available in full text. In some cases the information sent by UC-eLinks may not be an exact match for the journal article citation in the database; for example, UC-eLinks sent an issue number and the database did not index the issue number so the information does not match.
You can use the Search feature on the web site to look for your item by article title, journal title, or author. This may return the full text of the item, if the problem was due to the UC-eLinks information not matching the database citation. If you still cannot find the article on the website, please contact a librarian at your campus or use the "Report a problem with UC-eLinks" option under the "Get Help" section on the UC-eLinks menu.
Whenever possible, the UC-eLinks service links directly to the full text of the article. If this is not possible, it links to the journal title level on the journal home page or to the Search page of a database with full text. When this occurs, you can find your item in two ways:
If you still cannot find the article on the website, please contact a librarian at your campus or use the "Report a problem with UC-eLinks" option under the "Get Help" section on the UC-eLinks menu.
The publisher links, e.g., Elsevier Full Text articles or Nature Publishing Group, appear for all PubMed users. These links have no relationship to the UC systemwide or campus licenses for electronic resources, so you may or may not have access to the full text of the article. The UC-eLinks menu provides full text links only for the items that UC has licensed. If the item is not part of a UC systemwide or campus license, the UC-eLinks menus provides options such as searching the local library catalog to see if your campus library has the item in its print collection, or offers interlibrary loan for items not available at your campus.
Although UC makes every effort to provide access to as many electronic journals as possible, UC cannot provide access to all of the electronic journals. Many of the larger journal publishers allow UC to license packages of electronic journals for systemwide access to help control costs. Some journals are later sold to publishers that do not have systemwide UC contracts or contracts with individual campuses. In this case, UC may lose access to the electronic copy of the journal. In other cases, as a measure to control costs, some publishers allow UC to trade online access to one journal in exchange for losing online access to another journal each year or when the contract is renewed.
Saving the PDF to your workstation and then printing it from your workstation instead of the web site usually takes care of this problem. If this does not work, please contact a librarian at your campus and ask for assitance or use the "Report a problem with UC-eLinks" option under the "Get Help" section on the UC-eLinks menu.
This problem is usually due to a version incompatibility of Adobe Acrobat. You can usually fix this by installing the most current version of the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, which can be obtained from the Adobe website.
Popup blocking software affects the UC-eLinks menu's ability to display; check to make sure that your popup blocker is not preventing the UC-eLinks window from displaying.
Another possibility is that the UC-elinks menu window may already be open and hidden behind another window.
The first time you click on a UC-eLinks button (Window 1), the UC-eLinks menu will open in a new window (Window 2). The first time you choose an item from the UC-eLinks menu, a new window (Window 3) opens to display your choice from the UC-eLinks menu, e.g., full text, Request, or Ask a Librarian.
If you do not close the UC-eLinks menu window (Window 2), it will be reused the next time you click on the UC-eLinks button. Because this window is already open, it may not pop to the front of your workstation screen and it appears that nothing has happened.
If you do not close the window displaying your choice from the UC-eLinks menu (Window 3), it will be reused the next time you make a choice from the UC-eLinks menu. Once again, this window may not pop to the front, and it may appear that nothing has happened.
![[The UC-eLinks button is in Window 1. The UC-eLinks menu displays in Window 2. Your choice from the UC-eLinks menu disaplays in Window 3.]](chart.JPG)
When you click either the UC-eLinks button or select one of the options on a UC-eLinks menu and you don't see any action, always be sure to check any other open UC-eLinks windows to see if the data has changed.
UC-eLinks searches the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) for books and the ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) for journals in campus catalogs. Some campuses show you the closest match if the item is not found. If you are still interested in the locating the item, return to the UC-eLinks menu and click on the "Request this item from another library" link.
Usually, this happens when there is not enough information sent to UC-eLinks to provide a direct link to the item, for example, in the case where an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) or an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) is not included in the citation information. To find this item, go to your library catalog and search on the information in the reference you have for the item, e.g., by title or author. If you still cannot find the item, please contact a librarian at your campus for assistance.
The data sent by the database to UC-eLinks only includes the first author's name. If you want to include all the authors for a particular article in your bibliography, you'll need to add them manually.
UC-eLinks links to electronic text for ejournals licensed for the UC system and for ejournals licensed just by your home campus. Some ejournal publishers license the full text for their journal to multiple vendors. If the journal title is part of more than one UC license, you may see multiple links.
You may not have access to the licensed content. For example, if your campus license for an ejournal begins in 1999, and the article you want is published in 1998, then UC-eLinks does not offer a link to the electronic text.
It may also be that the database provider cannot fully separate the data elements for a citation and passes along only some of the metadata (data elements). This can happen even though the data is contained in the record and is "eye-readable". For example, if UC-eLinks does not receive all of the information required to link to an ejournal, then UC-eLinks does not offer a full text option to the user, even if the UC system has licensed the full text.
UC-eLinks provides a way to easily move from an article or book citation to the electronic version of the item, to check to see if the item is available on your campus, or to Request items not available on your campus.
When you click on the UC-eLinks icon/hyperlink during a database search session, the database provider sends a URL to UC-eLinks that contains information (metadata) about the item, e.g., author, title, publication date, page numbers, etc., in a structured format. UC-eLinks uses this metadata to determine which services to display in the UC-eLinks window by checking this information against the UC-eLinks data for the campus ejournal subscriptions and the years of coverage for the online subscription.
The information comes from the citation in your search result and is drawn from specific fields within the citation using markers within the fields to separate one piece of data from another. Database providers may use a different program for each type of data, e.g., journal articles, books, conference papers, in a database.
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UC-eLinks is an initiative of the California Digital Library © 2009 The Regents of the University of California © 2009 SFX by Ex Libris (USA) Inc. |