• The University of Exeter library catalogue, now available from any networked computer through a convenient web interface at http://library.exeter.ac.uk
• PsycLit: Psychological Abstracts on CD-ROM, networked across the university.  This service is now accessed through the world wide web, but you can still only do so from a machine connected to the university ethernet - i.e. not over a modem.  It does not yet work over all machines on the campus.  The url to make the connection is http://libcdrom/LaunchPro/.  The same interface gives access to some other data bases. You will get a list on your way to logging in to PsycLit, but note that it includes:
• ABI Inform, the major database for Business and management research, which is useful to economic psychologists.
• ASSIA, which stands for the Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts, which is generally good on the applied end of psychology
• Global Books in Print, which is very handy for getting bibliographic details of books.
• A guide to using PsycLit via the Silver Platter interface is available on the American Psychological Association's website.  The reference just given is to a local copy (held at http://www.exeter.ac.uk/~SEGLea/psy6002/yellow.htm, and this will be quicker for you to access, but if you want to be sure of having the most recent version, look at the original at http://www.apa.org/psycinfo/winspirs.html. - though even this was not fully up-to-date at the time of writing.  PsycLit will tell you whether journal sources are held in the Exeter library - if a *LHC field appears in the abstract, the journal (though not necessarily the issue you want) is available here, and you will get some information about where, and what volume range we hold.
• Web of Science: New users should use this service to gain access to the ISI databases, i.e. the Science and Social Science Citation Indexes.  It offers a very simple web interface which integrates simple searches with citation searches very smoothly.  To get access to the databases you will need to know the userid (the same for all Exeter University users) and the password: you have to fill in a registration form (obtainable from the university library or Rachel Kirby) in order to get the password.  BIDS (see below) and Web of Science use the same userid and password.
• BIDS (currently renaming itself to Ingenta): a major collection of bibliographic and other databases located at the University of Bath. Our greatest use of it is for access to the ISI databases, i.e. the Science and Social Science Citation Indexes, which are now being transferred to the Web of Science service (see above); but it also offers an Education database, including ERIC and the British Education Index, the standard sources for Education research, and an alternative route for accessing the IDEAL collection of full-text articles. The web-based interface for all the BIDS databases starts at http://www.bids.ac.uk and is very easy to use. To get access to the databases you will need to know the userid (recently changed, but the same for all Exeter University users) and the password: you have to fill in a registration form (obtainable from the university library or Rachel Kirby) in order to get the password. BIDS (see below) and Web of Science use the same userid and password.
• The Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) of other university libraries. There is a list of these at the NISS (National Information Services and Systems) site. Usually you get access through a telnet session, typically with the username "Library" or "Guest", and no password required.
• A combined OPAC of some of Britain's biggest research libraries, COPAC, is available. Its web interface at http://copac.ac.uk/copac is excellent, and more libraries are steadily being added. Unfortunately the larger libraries closest to us (Bristol and Southampton) are not yet members, but at a minimum this is a useful way of getting bibliographic information about books. Also, the University of London Senate House library is a member, and because the British Psychological Society's library (a valuable collection of journals) is housed there, society members including student subscribers can get free access.
• The catalogue of the US Library of Congress - probably the largest single catalogue of books in the world. It now has a simple web interface at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catalog.  No user id or password is required. Service can be slow, especially during US office hours.
• The British Library online catalogue is held at http://opac97.bl.uk/Search?Action=New. This is the largest single catalogue of books published in the UK, and also includes many books published in other countries (but the bibliographic information tends not to be as complete as in the Library of Congress catalogues). Access is usually quicker than to the Library of Congress, especially during American daylight hours.
• For certain sorts of books, public libraries may be a valuable source.  There is a web page at http://ds.dial.pipex.com/harden/weblibs.html which provides links to those public libraries in the UK that have their own web pages; at present not all of them have OPACs, but the number will no doubt grow rapidly.  The Devon library service, which runs the city centre library in Exeter, has its catalogue available on the net at http://wwwgalaxy.eal.devon-cc.gov.uk/
• The large booksellers all have a presence on the Internet, and these can be a very good source for information about books - whether you simply want to find out bibliographic details, or are considering buying a copy.  Booksellers will often list the chapter titles of books, for example, a considerable advance over what you can get out of Books in Print.  The best known is Amazon, who now have a UK site at http://www.amazon.co.uk, but the big academic booksellers also have sites which are sometimes better for academic books - try http://www.blackwells.com, http://www.heffers.co.uk, or http://www.dillons.co.uk.  All offer ordering over the web, though delivery time promises (especially from Amazon) need to be taken with a pinch of salt particularly when books are described as "available to order" or worse, "special order".
• Most major publishers have web sites which are also good sources for detailed information about books.  The sitenames can usually be guessed, e.g. either http://www.oup.com or  http://www.oup.co.uk will get you Oxford University Press.
• Firstsearch: another collection of databases, accessed via a web interface at http://www.ref.uk.oclc.org:3000/html/fs_pswd.htm. We use it chiefly for MEDLINE, the standard medical database. It also includes WORLDCAT, a world-wide catalogue of periodical holdings; unfortunately the coverage of Britain is poor, and COPAC (see above) will usually do a better job. An authorisation code and password is required; any registered student can be informed of this code on application to Rachel Kirby or Stephen Lea.
• EDINA: a service very like the old BIDS text interface, which some users will recall. The database of most interest to us that it contains is BIOSIS (Biological Abstracts). There is information about it at http://edina.ed.ac.uk/. To use EDINA, you connect via a telnet session to edina.ed.ac.uk. Individuals who want to use Edina need to register with the library (contact the main issue desk for new registrations, David Salter for renewals), when they will be given a username and password; usernames issued before October 1998 will no longer be valid..
• NISS also maintains many other lists of reference materials. One of the most useful is its list of a number of the world's largest libraries. It can be found at http://www.niss.ac.uk/reference/othlibres.html. Another excellent list is provided by Galaxy, a commercial but free WWW service; it can be found at http://galaxy.tradewave.com/galaxy/Reference/Libraries.html. It is worth drawing particular attention to the California Digital Library site at http://www.cdlib.org; among other resources, this gives access to Melvyl, the University of California library catalogue, one of the largest academic libraries in the world.  You are likely to find other library sites that are interesting for particular reasons. Foreign library catalogues are often useful for finding information about books even if you have no prospect of visiting them.

All the above are essentially ways of finding out what literature exists - they do not give access to the literature itself. However, journal articles are beginning to be made available on the web directly in a variety of ways. The university library has established a gateway to those we can access, at http://www.ex.ac.uk/~ijtilsed/lib/ejournals.html.  Among the most useful ones are

• A considerable number of Academic Press journals are available through the "IDEAL" service.  This can be contacted directly at http://www.janet.idealibrary.com
• An alternative access to the IDEAL service, which also gives access to journals from other publishers, is through the BIDS/Ingenta gateway (it is part of the IngentaJournals service). We expect that the BIDS link will be the faster method, and as it is not restricted to Academic Press it is probably the better option.  Abstracts are in plain text; to read the full articles, you will need an Adobe Acrobat reader on your computer, but this is available free if you don't have one - the IDEAL page has details. If you are working from a computer on the university network, you can log straight in to the IDEAL site.  Off-campus, you will need to know the Exeter username and password before you can use this service (contact Stephen Lea, Rachel Kirby, or the library for information), or you can go through BIDS, when you can use the same username and password as for other BIDS services.
• Catchword (http://www.catchword.co.uk) is a general service for publishers allowing secure access to commercial information.  You can use it to access full text versions of some journals to which our library subscribes, including Psychology Press journals.  Unfortunately, it does not use standard browsing/reading software: to use it, your computer must have the additional RealPage software installed.  This is freely available and easily installed from the Catchword web pages, and most machines in the School will soon have it available as standard.  Once installed, you can get a list of available journals from by connecting via your browser to http://pinkerton.catchword.com/mysubs.rif; this is the server for the UK academic community - if it is down or jammed, as it sometimes is, try the server for Germany (http://nabucco.catchword.com/mysubs.rif).
• The EBSCO archive. This has both a page-image and a text-only service.  For the page-image service, go to http://www-uk.ebsco.com/online : the site acts as a gateway to a number of different resources.  No username or password is required if logging in from a campus machine or university modem service.  The text-only service is indexex at http://www.niss.ac.uk/ebsco/index.html. A username and password are required, but they are the same as for the BIDS service (see above).  I have not yet been able to work out the relationship between these two services.
• Psychology Online, the online service of the Psychology Press.  Its home page is at http://www.tandf.co.uk/PSYPRESS/psychonline.htm
• All abstracts, and some full texts, of articles published by the American Psychological Association (APA) are available from

http://www.apa.org/journals/
• Economic psychologists need to know about the RePEc data base of research papers in economics.  A catalogue of those that can be downloaded can be accessed via the WoPEc interface at Manchester (http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/WoPEc.html); another well known interface to RePEc is called IDEAS.  RePEc is a collection of online and offline materials in economics, including both published and not-yet-published, working paper, materials.  WoPEc gives you access to the online materials; there is a parallel index of non-downloadable materials called BibEc - you can branch to this from the WoPEc page.  This is an interesting project because it is not so much an archive as a meta-archive - it gives access to a whole list of individual archives held by different organizations world-wide.

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Document revised 29th October 1999 by AJM/RN, 19th July 2000 by SEGL

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