While on the reference desk I received a telephone call from a faculty member, working at home, who said when he tried to use the persistent link to an article from The Economist, entitled “Generation Y Goes to Work,” which he located using ABI Inform Global, for his Blackboard site, he received a message that asked for the ABI Inform Global password. He wanted to know the password. I checked with some colleagues, who suggested that he use e-reserve for the article, or scan it and put it up as a pdf. However, the faculty member said that they were told to use Blackboard.
So, we tried locating the same article, and another Economist article for the same course, Bus 9551, on Business Source Premier. He was able to successfully use the persistent links in Business Source Premier on Blackboard.
He said that there are many sections of Bus 9551, all with the same readings, so I am offering this information in case others call/email that they have trouble linking from ABI Inform Global.
He also said that some Harvard Business School cases are assigned for this course and the students are being told that they need to buy the cases.
I’m wondering if we should tell professors to always include the EZ Proxy prefix to any URL for articles they link to. If you just take a permanent or stable link out of a database and add it to Blackboard or any other web site where you can add links, a user off campus clicking that link wouldn’t get in because the URL didn’t send them through our proxy server first. When I send permanent links to professors and students, I put this at the start of the URL to ensure that the link will work off campus: http://remote.baruch.cuny.edu/login?url=