The University of Akron’s online libraries page has a new look and new search tools.

The tools are the “gateway to books and articles,” Beate Gersch told a group of journalism students gathered in Bierce Library last month.

Search-A-Roo, the web-scale search engine that went live Sept. 28, retrieves search results from both databases and the UA Libraries online catalog, Gersch said. Previously, the online catalog had to be searched separately.

Gersch spent most of her lecture talking about LibGuides, a template she and other subject librarians put together for students. The new template categorizes information from databases, websites and the UA libraries online catalog.

LibGuides is not a database, Gersch said, but a “shopping cart” where students can find resources on particular subjects or courses. The template is similar to pathfinders in the old days.

“It’s still a work in progress,” Gersch said. The template will grow and be edited over time.

University of Akron students should never have to pay for articles, Gersch said, since almost any scholarly article or news article is available free through the school’s
databases.

Gersch clicked through a variety of databases found in the LibGuide template such as Academic Search Complete, LexisNexis Academic and Newspaper Source. She answered students’ questions and had them work their way through LexisNexis.