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Faculty Guide: Sharing Links vs. Uploading PDFs

The Best Place to Find Links to Share

OneSearch can provide permalinks for most articles and books you may want to use. The benefit of using OneSearch permalinks is that you don't need to worry about authentication issues. Authentication will be prompted by OneSearch if the user is from off-campus. The permalink is located below the title and author information in the Send To section.

Why Share Links Instead of Uploading PDFs in Blackboard?

Legal: Many of our database licenses stipulate the use of permanent links into their interface over uploading content into Course Management Systems.

Statistical: There is no way for us to count uses of content uploaded directly into Blackboard, but we are able to count uses in database interfaces. If you are uploading PDFs instead of linking into databases, you are helping underrepresent usage for your subject area. Usage data is a very important driver of which databases we subscribe to, and which we cancel.

What You Need to Know About Sharing Links

To share a link, make sure to grab the permalink. The permalink will have our OpenAthens Authentication tied to the URL. 

Please contact the library if you need help ensuring links work off-campus. 

Contact Us

If you still need clarification, please contact reference@csp.edu and we can help you create valid URLs to share with your students.