Paul Stainthorp Schrödinger's cataloguer

University of Lincoln students and staff have full-text access to the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Digital Library “core package” of around 50 ACM journals and magazines, but not to the full text of conference proceedings which also form part of the ACM Digital Library.

This can make it confusing to search the Digital Library: its search results don’t distinguish between material which is part of the core package and that which is not, and it’s not until you try clicking on a ‘Full text available’ link that you discover whether you will be granted access to a particular article.

The core package titles are listed on the Library’s e-journals website.

What follows is a somewhat inelegant hack, but one which does provide a reasonably reliable way of limiting your search to only those articles which are available as part of the core package:

1. Log in to the ACM Digital Library. (University of Lincoln students and staff: off-campus access is available via the University Portal.)
2. Click on the ‘Advanced Search’ option, toward the top right of the screen.
   
3. Toward the bottom of the advanced search form, you should see a field labelled ‘Find ISBN/ISSN’. Copy and paste this list of core package ISSNs (International Standard Serial Numbers) into the ‘Find ISBN/ISSN’ field.
   
4. Then, enter your search terms in the ‘Words or Phrases’ search boxes toward the top of the form, and hit ‘Search’.
   
5. You should see a list of search results, containing articles from only those publications which form part of the core package. All the articles in these search results should be available in full text to University of Lincoln students and staff.