Electronic Resources / Research Tools:

Winnefox provides access to many reliable resources, available to both you and your patrons through your library’s website. These resources include those provided by BadgerLink and WPLC, as well as others we purchase cooperatively for all of our libraries:

BadgerLink resources include the African American Biographical Database, numerous EBSCO products, LitFINDER, NewspaperARCHIVE, Proquest and TeachingBooks.
WPLC provides both of our electronic book offerings, NetLibrary and Overdrive.
Winnefox purchases EBSCO, Grolier and WorldCat products.

On your library’s Research Tools web page, we categorize the available resources into subject guides (biographies, genealogy, health, etc.) and format (encyclopedias, newspapers, etc.), and also offer an A-Z list of resources.

Your patrons may access these online resources from within your library or from their home or work computer. When accessing these resources from home, patrons are presented with an authentication screen where they need to enter their library card number and (for all libraries except Brandon and Neshkoro) PIN. (This is the same library card number and PIN that patrons use to access their account through our catalog). We use a product called EZProxy to manage home access to resources.

We also provide links to recommended websites. (Access to these websites doesn’t require a library card number or PIN.) If you often use a web site to answer your patron’s reference questions but it isn’t listed on one of the subject/format web pages, please contact Keetra Baker who can add it to the appropriate page(s), so other libraries may benefit from linking to it too.

We provide usage statistics for these products, updated monthly. Included in these statistics are various reports we receive from each resource’s vendor, and – new for 2007 – a record of the number of times your patrons click a link to any of our resources or recommended websites. This provides a way for us to compare use across resources, since we'll be tracking the very same statistic for products from Grolier, Ebsco, etc. Reports from each vendor provide very different usage statistics, so now we can easily compare usage from one vendor’s product to another. If your library manages its own website & you link to any of these resources outside your Electronic Resources / Research Tools pages, OR If you have a link to an outside resource you’d like tracked, please contact Keetra Baker for information on creating the URL to use so clicks for those links are tracked in your click-counts.

If you have any other questions regarding your Electronic Resources / Research Tools, please contact Keetra Baker.