Most of the online information sources such as eBooks, journal articles, and databases provided by the FAU Libraries are only available to current FAU students, staff, and faculty. This includes nursing and health science resources such as CINAHL, Embase, and Cochrane Library. This is because of the licensing agreements between the Libraries and the companies that sell access to these sources. This information is not free, but is subscription-based.
Because of this, patrons who want to use many FAU library sources at home or away from FAU must authenticate themselves using Off Campus Connect/ EZproxy. Authentication identifies a patron as an authorized user of these resources. This is a highly common practice for libraries.
Google, the popular internet search engine, is an index of web pages. It is a finding tool for internet web pages and can help identify some sources of information; Google itself is not a direct source of information like a book or journal article. Its technology searches the content of web pages and some documents, and then provides links to them.
Google Scholar is designed to search academic, research, and governmental web pages. However, it has limited ability to search specialized resources such as databases. Many databases and other information sources do not provide direct access through Google due to their licensing restrictions and business practices; while Google may provide scholarly articles in a list of results, the publishing companies who own the content require a purchase for it and often provide access through a paywall!
Google is the most commonly used resource for finding content on the web, but it does not provide a broad or comprehensive search for information. Instead, use it in combination with subject-specific databases when searching for information.
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