ITER for Dummies:  From a Texas Tech computer or from your eraider account, go to the Library Web site (http://library.ttu.edu/ul ).  On the left of your screen, under “RESEARCH,” you should click on “Find Articles.”  This takes you to a screen titled “Find Articles (Electronic Databases).”  Toward the top of that page is an alphabet index, a finding system where you click on a letter that is the first letter of the item you wish to locate:  click “I”.   Then scroll down the list of databases that begin with “I” until you reach the last item “Iter:  Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance.”  Click that.  On the Iter home screen that appears, click “Connect to:  Iter Bibliography.”   That will give you a screen which includes a search box:  type there any name on which you are working, for example “Richard Lionheart”  or “Gregory VII”; then hit “search.”  On your screen will appear a list of journal articles, editions, books, and reviews that deal with your subject, neatly organized from most recent to least recent (which is inconsistent for the years prior to the time when this bibliographic project was started, about 20 years ago).

            What do you do with this bibliographical information?  Print it out and go to work.   Most major journals and university-press-published English language monographs are in the Library’s stacks where you can go and consult them. 

To get electronic copies of many articles, without even going to the Library, go to JSTOR.  To do this, go back to the screen titled “Find Articles (Electronic Databases).”  At the alphabet index, click “J”.   Then scroll down the list of databases that begin with “J” to the second item “JSTOR,” a data base that contains the full texts of hundreds of history journals, except for their most recent five years of publications.  Click that.   You can search JSTOR many ways, but the easiest way is to use the “advanced search” box and type in a couple of words from a bibliographical citation (for example. “Cowdrey” and “Gregory VII”), and hit “search”:  if what you want is in the data base, it will show up.  Then you can click it and print it.

Another good database for full-text copies, which often even includes the most recent articles, is “Project Muse.”  To reach this, go back to the screen titled “Find Articles (Electronic Databases).”  At the alphabet index, click “P”.   Then scroll down the list of databases that begin with “P” to the fourteenth item, “Project Muse,” and click it. Now you will get a screen, organized alphabetically, that lists all the journals available in this database.  You can track down an article by clicking to the appropriate journal issue.  Or you can go to the search feature at the top of the page and use a key word search, separating non-contiguous items by “and.”   Click to what you want and you can get to a full text version that you can print.