Guidelines for Posting Articles into Blackboard

Library and Information Services has developed some guidelines to help you evaluate the types of materials that work best for using article readings in Blackboard.

Choose material which does not already exist in digital form to save time, paper, and space on the server. What is not appropriate is material which is:

  1. Already on a reliable web site; or
  2. Major newspaper or popular journal articles available from Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe (e.g., The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, The New Yorker, etc.); or
  3. Journal articles available electronically from JSTOR, Project Muse, Science Direct, or other stable sources.

Faculty should direct their students to such online material via a URL in their Blackboard course site and/or via their syllabus.

We ask that faculty and/or their assistants carefully check their readings to see what is available electronically. You can now search the Library Catalog to see what journal titles are available electronically through library subscriptions or click here.

Please use the links to then verify that the article you have in mind is actually present in the database (some titles are only selectively available). If the journal title does not show up in the list, it is most likely not available online at Dickinson, and may be a candidate for submission into Blackboard. Staff from the Library and are happy to help you interpret the catalog records. Stop by the reference desk, call x1602, or use our Ask a Librarian form by clicking here.

For example, to link to the article “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain” in the Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 18, 1989 on JSTOR, use the stable url by clicking here.

Choose material of a reasonable length and excerpt size. The typical document for use in Blackboard is 20 pages or less. Excerpts from books should only be 10% of the entire book, which is typically one chapter, to meet copyright guidelines. If you have questions about copyright, please click here.

Choose clean and clear photocopies. If you must use copies with large black borders, you must crop them when scanning them, as such borders use extraordinarily large amounts of toner when printed and take far longer to print as well.

All PDF files should be named following the naming convention “author or title.pdf”. Be sure there are no spaces when naming your pdf file. Separate words and numbers with a underscore. For example, the article "The Alchemy of Charity", by Katherine Bowie should be named: "bowie.pdf" Keep the file name as short as possible. You can edit the name in the Blackboard progam to be a long as you like.

Please note that there is a 31 character limit (including the extension) on the filename.

Instructors are the controllers of their Blackboard course sites and have control over who can access the site. For more information, see the Blackboard documentation on the LIS web site.