AU Library

Using Library Online Resources at Ajman University

Many of the most important library resources you will need while pursuing a degree at Ajman University, are available electronically on the AU Library’s home page. This tutorial will summarize many of the resources and services available to you online and how to use them. When you are off campus, you will need to log in to use many of the library's home page features. All students, are issued an AU student identification card and a student number. For most campus activities, your STUDENT number will be needed. The two elements required to log in to the services provided by the library home page and its many features are a USER ID and a PASSWORD. The USER ID is the student number on your student identification card. The PASSWORD, is the password given to you by the IT office to use your university email, unless you change it yourself. Whenever prompted, these are the two bits of information you will need—the only two bits of information that the library site needs. Many of the potential problems encountered logging in to the library website can be solved quickly on telephone, at least on weekdays. This, assuming you are a currently registered student.

How to access and use AU library online databases:

From any computer, anywhere, anytime.

  1. Go to AU Library website. https://library.ajman.ac.ae/
  2. Click on DATABASES.
  3. Choose you database from the list or from the colleges list below.
  4. Click on chosen database.
  5. Enter your username & password.
  6. Access the database.
  7. To get started, enter your topic in the search box or select your discipline and browse the titles available.

Open Access Resources: What is Open Access?

Open Access Resources are electronic research materials and resources that have been made available to the general public, free of charge: data and datasets, books and articles, including scholarly research articles.  This is not the same thing as public domain works, or those items that have fallen out of copyright protection; open access authors have chosen to share freely, so anyone can use the works legally without permission or fees.

Open Access has become widely popular in scholarly research and communication as the prices of academic resources have grown significantly this past decade and academic libraries budgets have not risen to meet these new expenses.

AU Library Selected Open Access Resources:

  • Amedeo Free medical books         
  • Amedeo Free medical journals
  • BA Information for Africa (BAIFA)
  • Biomedical open access sources
  • Directory of open access books
  • Directory of open access e-repositories
  • Directory of open access journals
  • Directory of open access scholarly resources (ROAD)
  • Dove Press medical e-journals
  • E-journals library
  • Geneva free medical journals
  • Google Books
  • HathiTrust Digital Library
  • Hindawi open access e-journals
  • Mary Ann medical journals
  • Open access books in sci-tech
  • Open Library
  • Open Textbook Library
  • Project Gutenberg
  • Science Direct open
  • Springer open portfolio (free e-journals)
  • Taylor & Francis open e-journals
  • Wiley open access

 

How to access and use AU library open access databases:

From any computer, anywhere, anytime.

  1. Go to AU Library website. https://library.ajman.ac.ae/
  2. Click on DATABASES.
  3. Choose you database from the list or from (Open Access Scholarly Websites) below.
  4. Click on chosen database.
  5. Access the database.
  6. To get started, enter your topic in the search box or select your discipline and browse the titles available.

 

SUBJECT COVERAGE IN THE SUBSCRIPTION DATABASES: AN ONLINE DATABASE INDEX:

The benefits of acquainting yourself with the diverse tools available on the library's home page should be obvious. Looking over the entire list of available databases in the Databases A-Z page and reading through the scope notes attached to individual databases will give you some idea of the overall coverage of academic disciplines and subjects in each. This will make the initial steps of college-level library research much easier. Having chosen a topic, one of the first tasks you face is finding research material--the best, most appropriate materials available, including both books and periodical articles. For books, go to AU Library Catalog first. If needed, expand the search to the entire Catalog Plus system or, using the EBSCO Discovery Services link in the pale-blue column at the far left of the library home page. For periodical articles, go to the Databases A-Z page. Once there, you will need to find the databases most suitable to the needs of your project--the databases that cover your specific topic best and are most practical for the research you will be conducting. If, for example, you are doing a paper on Children's Dental Health (your subject), the Linguistics database would obviously not be as appropriate as Dentistry & Oral Sciences Source or Wiley Online Dentistry Journals. Familiarity with the databases and their content will not only steer you in the right direction of choosing the most focused resources, it will also help you deal with the vast amount of overlap that is inevitable when confronted by so many sources of information or when you are working on a well-traveled topic that might cross several disciplines. Children's Dental Health might be best researched in the subject-specific Dentistry & Oral Sciences Source, but there will be many other databases that might be of some potential use to the subject, depending on what aspect of Children's Dental Health you have chosen to explore.

The following summaries may be of use, at least initially, as you begin searching for the databases most closely linked to the topics you are exploring. Note that several are best seen and described as general resources. Being neither discipline- or subject-specific, they can be used to search almost any subject. The principal drawback of some of these, though certainly not all of them, is that their coverage can be diffuse and can vary in quality: they are not always the best sources of the scholarly or professional literature often required of you. Full-text indexes like Academic Search Ultimate are an example, while a few of the multi-discipline/multi-subject databases like ScienceDirect, despite its confusing title, cover many disciplines (including the arts and humanities) and subjects in great scholarly and professional detail.

GENERAL--MUTLIPLE SUBJECT DATABASES:

Multiple subject coverage without any overall focus like for example:

Academic Search Ultimate

Academic Search Ultimate offers students an unprecedented collection of peer-reviewed, full-text journals, including many journals indexed in leading citation indexes. The combination of academic journals, magazines, periodicals, reports, books and videos meets the needs of scholars in virtually every discipline ranging from astronomy, anthropology, biomedicine, engineering, health, law and literacy to mathematics, pharmacology, women’s studies, zoology and more.

AL-MANHAL

Al Manhal is the world’s only provider of full-text searchable databases of thousands of eBooks, e-Journals, e-Theses, strategic reports, and conference proceedings from the Arab and Islamic worlds.

Directory of open access books

36,468 academic peer-reviewed books from 599 publishers. DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.

II DISCIPLINE-SPECIFIC DATABASES

Clear overall focus on one or more discipline, but not on individual subjects like for example:

ABI/INFORM Collection

ABI/INFORM Collection includes important full-text journals and much sought-after titles from the business press as well as key trade publications, dissertations, conference proceedings, and market reports will help today's researchers resolve tomorrow's problems.

Amedeo Free medical journals

Over 4000 free medical journals. Daily presentations of new journals. Free subscription to the journal alerts.

Business Source Ultimate

Business Source Ultimate works for your students like a solid business plan – it offers an unprecedented wealth of peer-reviewed, full-text journals and other resources that provide historical information and current trends in business that spark discussion on future developments and changes in the business world.

SUBJECT-SPECIFIC DATABASES

Databases that can be used reliably to research individual topics within the individual subjects like for example:

Access Pharmacy

McGraw-Hill's Access Pharmacy is a comprehensive online content solution for the changing demands of pharmacy education. It allows students to select a core curriculum topic, browse by organ system, review textbooks, or search across leading pharmacy online references.

ACM Digital Library

The ACM Digital Library is a vast collection of citations and full text from the Association for Computing Machinery, including journal and newsletter articles and conference proceedings. Topics include cognitive and computer science, informatics, artificial intelligence and mathematics. Is a full-text database that covers the fields of computing and information technology. It includes the complete collection of ACM's publications, including journals, conference proceedings, magazines, newsletters, and multimedia titles.

OMICS scientific journals

Scientific Journals that focus on the applications of OMICS technologies in multiple disciplines. It offers open access to the original, peer-reviewed articles related to OMICS technologies in various disciplines.