How to Use Electronic Reserves

This Electronic Reserves site allows access to book chapters, journal articles, and class notes which your instructor has chosen to augment the study materials for your course. Please help us comply with existing copyright laws by restricting access to the documents to only those students enrolled in the class.

STEP 1: Log In - Each time you enter the site you must Login with the userid and password for your class provided to you by your instructor. All letters are generally entered using upper case and are case sensitive.

STEP 2: Locate the Readings for Your Class - After logging in, the first screen you will see is the Browse screen where you select your document(s). You will see to the left of your screen a hierarchical list of all the collections and sub-collections which you have access to. You should look down this list to the sub-heading "Electronic Reserve Collections". Under this sub-heading look for the name of your institution. Under the correct university look for the name of your class, click on it and a list of the readings should appear to your right. (If you get the message "Server Error" it just means that there are no readings directly associated under that class, usually because all of the readings are in sub-collections under that class. Click on one of the sub-collections under that class and you should see a list of readings appear in the box to your right.) Select one of the readings by clicking on the title and then clicking on the View button. After viewing and/or printing the reading you may return to this screen and select another reading in the list by clicking again on the class name in the hierarchical list in the left frame.

Alternatively, you can use the Search option at the top of the screen to select your document(s). After selecting Search you will see a "scroll box" with a list of all the collections and sub-collections you have access to. You should look down this list to the sub-heading "Electronic Reserve Collections". Under this sub-heading, look for the name of your institution (several universities in the state share this service). Under the correct university look for the name of your class, click on it and then click the Search button at the bottom of the screen and a list of the readings will appear on a new screen. Select one of the readings by clicking on the title. After viewing and/or printing the reading you may return to this screen and select another reading in the list by clicking on your browser's Back button.

STEP 3: Viewing - In viewing mode you can use the "Next", "Previous", "First", and "Last" boxes above the document viewing window to navigate through the document. Notice that by clicking anywhere inside the document viewing window, a full screen view of the current page is displayed. By clicking on the Thumbnails option you can see a mini-view of the first ten pages. Clicking within one of them will give you a fullscreen view of that page. While in Thumbnail mode, clicking "Next" will advance ten pages at a time. This can be useful when navigating a large document.

STEP 4: Printing - The original readings, or Xerox copies of the originals, have been scanned in and stored in two digital formats. The first format you see when you view a document is maximized for viewing on your computer monitor over the web. This format (8 bit JPEG grayscale), although it looks good on the screen, does not look good when printed on a laser printer. If you try to print from the viewing screen, you will only be able to print one page at a time and these pages will have a poor print quality. That is why a second format (Portable Document Format or PDF) is provided.

The "print file format" is available by selecting the "PRINT - View/Download" box above the document viewing window. After the file has been downloaded it can be printed to any locally accessible printer by clicking on the small printer icon at the far left of the toolbar just above the document viewing window. Before you can download a file you should have installed the Adobe Acrobat Reader with Search software. This software is already loaded on all PCs in the computer labs and library at GSU. If you do not have it loaded at home you may download it for free from Adobe's web site.

The purpose of this site is to make it as easy and inexpensive as possible for students to have access to these materials. We hope that this technology does not "get in the way", but rather gives you the freedom to view your readings any time of day or night and from a location convenient to you. Please let us know of any problems, suggestions, or comments you may have.