Did you know that your IMechE membership gives you access to over 17,000 online journals? You can access these in multiple ways through the online library, but the best way is with BrowZine. What’s BrowZine, you ask? It’s a user-friendly way to browse and read journals anywhere – online, on your phone, your tablet, even offline. Let us take you through it!
So, what is BrowZine?
BrowZine is a ‘journal engagement service’. If you are a frequent library user, you may have noticed that when it comes to online resources, especially journals, it is hard to see what a library holds without conducting a search. You may have a general idea of what you are looking for, but for an effective search, you may need to run several searches using different keywords. You can’t simply step into the library and walk around the shelves, like you would in real life.
BrowZine brings the online library experience much closer to the real-world experience – in other words, you are browsing virtual shelves, making it easier to discover journals and browse subjects.
And once you’ve found a journal you like the look of, one click takes you to the latest issue with the full text articles ready to read!
Great! How do I use it?
Go to browzine.com and select the Institution of Mechanical Engineers as your library. It will then ask you to log in with your IMechE details, but you will only need to do this once.
Once you are logged in, you will see the home screen.
You can use the search box to search for a particular journal, or to search for a topic. Underneath the search box there is a list of subjects to browse through, if you prefer.
Let’s search for a topic!
First, type your topic into the search bar:
This will bring up journals or subject areas:
We then click on a journal title:
As you can see, clicking on a journal title will take you directly to the latest issue, but you can also easily find past volumes and issues on the same page:
Once you decide on an article to read, simply click on the title and it will take you to where the full text article is held. You can then read the article online, or download a pdf.
Can I save journals and articles to read later?
Why yes, you can!
As well as being easy to use, BrowZine also has ‘My Bookshelf’ and ‘My Articles’ features. This means you can save whole journals to your bookshelf and individual articles to your articles collection.
My Bookshelf
BrowZine gives you four bookcases, each with four shelves. You can label the bookcases, so it is easy to sort your journals and keep your research projects separate if you need to. By saving journals on your bookshelf, you can then keep up to date with the latest issues and follow your favourite journals.
To save a journal to your bookshelf, simply click on the ‘+ add to my bookshelf’ button underneath the journal title:
My Articles
If you find an interesting article but don’t want to save the whole journal, you can save the article to your article collection. Like the bookshelf feature, you can create different folders to sort your articles into.
To save an article, click on the folder icon underneath the article title:
To use the My Bookshelf and My Article features, you will need to set up a free BrowZine account. This is separate to your IMechE account, and only requires an email address and a password.
Both ‘My Bookshelf’ and ‘My Articles’ sync across all your devices, so if you have the BrowZine phone app, you can access your saved journals and articles any time, anywhere. Check out our blog post on how to use the BrowZine app here.
If you would like to know more about BrowZine, check out their introductory video here:
IMechE Archive and Library 