Need help with a homework assignment?

Looking for free, scholarly articles for a paper?

Searching for newspaper articles on a specific subject?

Did you know Florida has an amazing and free website available to all of its residents called the Florida Electronic Library (FEL)? This site is easy to use and contains a ton of information on topics like current

events, health, general reference, Florida history, and more! This handout will show you how to navigate a few features on the site so you can see what it has to offer.

To arrive at the FloridaElectronic Library’s website go to:www.flelubrary.org

Have you gotten the site pulled up? Great! Now let’s take a look at the home page and see what the site has to offer.

How to Use the Florida Electronic

Library

Search Our CollectionsLooking for information

Need addition help? Click here to chat with a librarian.

Now that we have looked at the home page let’s begin navigating the site! The next few pages will look at two different scenarios for users coming to this site.

Search Our CollectionsLooking for information

Scenario #1 : High school student who needs to find articles on War and Peace author Leo Tolstoy.

Once you hit search a second page will open called the Gale Power Search site as you will see below. This is the page that will come up every time you do a search so take the time to familiarize yourself with it.

If you know your subject or topic the use the “Search Our Collections” bar. Simply type in the term and click the search button. For this example we are using “Leo Tolstoy”

Your resultsThis tells you the number of results available under each source type. If you would only like one source type, like books to appear, simply click and new search results will appear. These are your search

results. Simply click the blue link to pull up the full text.

This is what the same page looks like when you scroll down. Now you can see ways to limit your results.

Need to change your search? Simply type in another query and hit enter If you have

found results you are looking for but must return later click bookmark and they will be saved to your computer.

Limit Search byUnder this tab you can limit your search by publication dates, types, subjects, and more. This will help narrow down your results.

Scenario Two: A working father of two would like to find a place to read current magazines for free.

From the home page simply click on the newspaper and magazines tab. From here you have two choices: To select one of the popular ones that are suggested or to click on A-Z publications and search for one by name.

If you do choose A-Z Publications this screen will appear.

Select a featured newspaper or magazine or click A-Z Publications to search by name. It’s that simple!

If you would like to browse by letter simply chose the letter and the results will appear. These are the results for the letter “N”.

If you would like to browse by a target audience, click on one of these limiters.

Finally, once you chose a publication simply click and this screen will appear. The final step will be to choose which publication date you would like to view. Once decided click on it and your publication will appear.

This has been a brief overview of Florida Electronic Library’s website. There are many more resources available. If you would like further assistance a librarian would be happy to help you.

If you move your cursor over the publication name you will see more detailed info including what years are on file

Publication dates that are available