Learning to use the EBSCO Religion Databases (OTA, NTA, RPC)

How do you find articles in periodicals, or essays within collected works, or book reviews? The Morton Library offers you a variety of indexing tools for this information, in the field of religious studies. Several of them are provided to us by a publisher/vendor known as EBSCO :

OTA — Old Testament Abstracts
NTA — New Testament Abstracts
RPC — Religion and Philosophy Collection

In addition, we subscribe to several important EBSCO databases in fields outside the traditional bounds of religious studies : Academic Search Complete (an interdisciplinary colllection of over 9000 indexed journals, 6000 of them in full text) and smaller subsets of this collection, such as Education Research Complete, Humanities International Complete, and Psychology and Behavioral Sciences. This tutorial will address the EBSCO religion indexes.

Many of the articles indexed by these databases are also provided in digital full text. Users are able read scanned images of the articles they select, directly through the database.

How to connect to the EBSCO databases online

On our Library public website, choose Online Databases, under the RESEARCH & RESOURCES tab. Click on one of the religion databases, such as New Testament Abstracts. If you are on our campus network (in the Library, faculty offices, etc) you will be connected seamlessly to the resource you requested. If you are off campus, you will be asked to supply your user ID and password.  Enter the same user ID and password you use to login to the Morton Library catalog.

For students, staff and faculty of UPSem

Your login will normally be your barcode number, as shown on your Library card; your password will be the first three letters of your last name.  If you have trouble connecting, you may need to check with our Circulation Supervisor, to make sure your account is up to date.  Please contact Lisa Janes at 804-278-4335 or ljanes@upsem.edu for further information.