Alumni and Retirees: Collections

Unfortunately, the BCIT Libraries cannot provide you with the same resources that you had while at BCIT.

Here are some suggestions of where you might go for information (such as ejournals and databases) during your professional career or retirement:

• Visit the BCIT Library on-campus
• Hospital Library: If you will be working in a hospital, check out the library and its collection. BC Health Authorities libraries provide resources based on the needs of the staff that work there and the services provided by the institution:
  • Children's & Women's Health Centre of British Columbia (C&W)
  • Fraser Health
  • Interior Health
  • Island Health
  • Northern Health
  • UBC Teaching Hospitals
  • Vancouver Coastal Health
• Your Professional Association: Many associations provide online information resources as part of your membership benefits.
• In person research at an academic library. Here at BCIT you can use a workstation to access the electronic resources on campus. You will be able to email your searches and pdfs of ejournal articles. 
• Public Libraries in BC may provide access to databases relevant to your practice. Sign up for a card at the library close to where you live or work. You may be able to access their databases from home.
  • For Residents outside of B.C.: Find public and other libraries near you via WorldCat, another option is A directory of libraries throughout the world
• Free Resources: Look at some of the suggested Open Access Resources for ideas about how you can stay up to date in your practice. These resources will have varying degrees of openness. For example, the PubMed database is free to search and some journal articles that are found may also be free but many others will require that you pay for access.

BCIT Archives & Special Collections check this guide if you are interested in finding and using materials from the BCIT Archives.

Institutional and subject repositories can include theses, dissertations, authors' pre-prints or post-prints of articles, data, and other content.

BCIT Institutional Repository includes student and staff scholarly work.

Repositories for Scholarly Works lists some international repositories.

TSpace is a  research repository established by University of Toronto Libraries to disseminate and preserve the scholarly record of University of Toronto

OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories. Each OpenDOAR repository has been visited by project staff to check the information that is recorded here. As well as providing a simple repository list, OpenDOAR lets you search for repositories or search repository contents.

Cogprints an electronic archive for papers in any area of the Sciences.

OAD: Disciplinary repositories it is a directory of subject repositories

PharmGuide is an annotated directory of high quality, freely available, online drug information resources intended for use by librarians, pharmacists, and the public. PharmGuide is intended to facilitate the search for resources by providing links to only those sources that have been critically appraised and that meet specific quality criteria

Pharmacy Portals

• GlobalRPh -- The Clinician's Ultimate Reference - GlobalRPh.com was officially launched in November of 2000 and is based on a hospital-wide intranet that is located at the VA Medical Center in Detroit Michigan.
• Medscape Reference -- Drugs, diseases and procedures information from physicians and pharmacists from leading academic medical centers in the US and worldwide.
• Drug Information Resources -- From Dalhousie University. Some content is for Dalhousie staff and students but there are many open access resources.
• Drugs.com -- A website about prescription & OTC drug information for consumers & professionals. You can get advice on more than 24,000 prescription drugs, over-the-counter medicines & natural products.  This resource has a free mobile version.
• RxList -- Provides guides to prescription drug information including monographs on individual drugs..

Even if you can’t get access to e-books through a library, there are many high quality e-books that you can access for free online. Resources that are made openly available are called open access. 

A few places to search for free e-books:

• First Search at BCIT. Use the "Open access" filter after a search.
• B.C. Campus 
• PubMed/NCBI Bookshelf provides free online access to books and documents in life science and healthcare. Bookshelf enables users to easily browse, retrieve, and read content
• Open Research Library
• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
• WikiBooks

Dissertations/theses

• British Library EThOS  -- UK’s doctoral research theses.
• Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD) 
• Theses Canada Portal  

Finding government publications online from Canadian, U.S. and international government websites.

Country information

Most governments today have extensive websites, and make their publications freely available online. If you know a specific title, you can Google it. If you're searching for a topic, you may want to start at one of the links below, since the publications may be buried in a regular Google search.

• Canadian government documents
  • via Saint Mary's University
  • federal, provincial and municipal

• Catalogue of U.S. government publications
  • links to online federal publications
  • or to search across U.S. government websites in Google, add .gov to your keywords 

• Foreign government websites
  • via Northwestern University

Patient Education

These websites from reliable organizations provide information in a way that patients can understand.

• MedlinePlus provides health information from the US National Library of Medicine and National Institute of Health with easy access to Medline and health topics, medical dictionaries, directories and publications.
• Mayo Clinic website provides an easy look-up for Diseases and conditions; Symptoms; Drugs and supplements; Tests and procedures; and Healthy living suggestions.

Read more: Choosing effective patient education materials, page published on U.S. National Library of Medicine website.

Alerts and notifcations of information can be related to journal content, article database searches, and websites. A "subscription" or personal account is required to receive most alerting services. 

Keeping Current with the Literature, from the NIH Library, by setting up automatic alerts/notifications of new literature and emerging research.

Journal TOCs is a free and searchable collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs), from international sources.

EvidenceAlerts

BMJ Group and McMaster University's Health Information Research Unit collaborated to provide you with access to current best evidence from research, tailored to your own health care interests, to support evidence-based clinical decisions.

If you have citations in EndNote or RefWorks that you would like to move to a new citation manager, export them as an .RIS file. You can then import this file into your new free citation manager. Read more on citation managers.

• Mendeley 

  Reference manager that can help you store, organize, note, share and cite references and research data. Desktop version available for download. 

• Zotero 

  Web-based tools for managing citations, organizing pdfs, and creating bibliographies. Desktop version available for download. Includes a companion tool zoterobib that allows you to build an instant bibliography without creating an account or installing any software.

• SciWheel 

  Free basic plan allows you to store unlimited references.

Image adapted from University of Florida Library.

Click on image for a large view.

Even if you can’t get access to articles through a library, there are many high quality, peer-reviewed articles that you can access for free online. These resources may include journal articles that are free to read by anyone or articles that authors have made available themselves so that others can freely access their work. Resources that are made openly available are called open access (OA). 

A few places to search for free peer-reviewed articles:

• First Search at BCIT
• PubMed Central (PMC)
• Google Scholar
• Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• BioMed Central
• CiteSeerX
• Osti.gov
• Organic eprints

Due to licensing agreements, after you graduate/retire from BCIT, you will no longer be able to access our library databases and e-resources. You will have access to public/open access databases. See examples highlighted in the table below.

Also, make sure to investigate what resources you have through your workplace and any professional organizations of which you are a member.