How to Use the GALILEO Toolbar

The following tutorial will show you how to use the GALILEO Toolbar.

The GALILEO toolbar is a research tool for quick and easy access to GALILEO searching, databases, your library’s books, and other resources from any place on the web.

After downloading the toolbar plugin, you will be able to search individual databases, the library catalog, and the list of your electronic journals right from the GALILEO toolbar, including a federated search of all EBSCO databases. I will also show you how to use the highlight and right-click function, which will allow you to search your library catalog, find any book’s ISBN number in your library catalog or area catalogs through WorldCat.org, and to send any link through the GALILEO proxy in order to ensure access to resources from an off-campus computer.

First, I am going to show you how to download the toolbar. Go to the GALILEO homepage and click ìGet your GALILEO Toolbar under “Getting Started.” You will come to a page with some information on the toolbar. At the top of the page, just click on the Download link, and you will be given a download option for either Firefox or Internet Explorer. After you've downloaded the toolbar, you will be prompted to restart your browser. Once you have done this, the toolbar will appear at the top of your browser.

Now, let’s see what we can do with it.

From the toolbar, we are searching the topic: energy policy.

To add more search boxes, just click on the down arrow beside the search box.

Use the dropdown menu on the right to choose what you want to search. For now, we will search our terms in EBSCO databases.

To change your search, just click the Clear button. Type in your new search term and choose another resource to search if you like.

Notice that some resources let you change how to search for your term using the menu beside the search box. We will select Title since we are looking for the title of a magazine.

From the toolbar, you can also go to GALILEO using the links in the menu on the left.

If you want the advanced search features of a database, you can go to the left menu and choose to go directly to any of the databases listed.

Another great feature of the toolbar is the right-click menu options that appear when you highlight text – in any database or on the open web. For example, if you find a book in Amazon and you want to see if it’s in your library, you can highlight the title, right-click it, and then search your library's catalog for it.

The right-click menu also works if you highlight an author’s name or a standard number, such as an ISBN or ISSN.

Another way to use the right-click menu is to highlight a term found on any webpage. You can then choose to search this term in EBSCO or other library databases.

Here’s a little more advanced tip. Have you ever found a link to an article online and can’t get to the full text? Right-click that link and choose to go to the article’s site via your institution’s proxy. Using the proxy means that the site should recognize you as being from your institution and let you access the article if your institution has purchased the full text.

And last, if you want more options for how you want results to display or to turn on support for CiteULike, just go to the preference section. The Context Menu tab lets you decide which options you want to appear on the right-click menu.

This concludes this tutorial on how to use the GALILEO Toolbar. If you have any questions, please check GALILEO Help for FAQs or use the Contact Us form to submit a comment. Thank you and Happy Searching!

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