The Manchester College encourages students to use electronic resources where appropriate. Some of these resources are freely available over the internet and others are paid for by subscription. Freely available resources include Newspapers and Reference sources; you can access these resources simply by clicking on the links. Most of the College's Electronic Subscriptions, and e books are listed on a separate page, and Infotrac (a collection of several thousand electronic journals) is also listed separately. In order to use the electronic subscriptions and Infotrac you need to know about a service called Athens.
Athens
Athens was established in the education sector in 1996 and is now the standard mens of obtaining secure access to subscription-based resources. Before you can look at these paid-for resources Athens will check that you are who you say you are and will then allow you access to those resources that you or your College has paid for. Many of these resources are listed on the Learning Centre website and you will have to log in to them using the Athens validation service. (This is especially true if you use them outside College.)
To log in you will need to create an Athens username and password. Obtain an "Athens Student Logon Request Form" from your Learning Centre; complete and return the form. You will receive notification of your account through your TMC student e mail. If you would like to see all of the Athens-validated resources that you are able to use go straight to the Athens website. Enter your username and password, click to accept their terms of use and then click on resources.
How to use the Internet
The Intute Virtual Training Suite provides free Internet tutorials to help you learn how to get the best from the Web for your education and research. The tutorials are written and updated by a team of subject specialists based in universities and colleges across the UK. Click the list of tutorials and then chose the one that interests you. Alternatively you can use the Internet Detective (another of Intute's free services) to learn how to use the internet effectively.
