Finding and Creating Permalinks : Home

If you are assigning library e-books, articles, films or audio files to your class, you can save your students from purchasing classpacks and readers, and comply with copyright law, in 2 steps:

1. Use Scholar OneSearch to find out if Northeastern University's Libraries provide access
2. Use the "link" feature in Scholar OneSearch to offer students access from anywhere with their Northeastern login

Other times to use permalinks:

• when emailing Northeastern colleagues
• in your citation management software as a secondary link for Northeastern audiences
• when sharing resources in teams with Northeastern colleagues

You may have noticed that sometimes a URL that you copy and paste from a library database doesn't work correctly when you or your students try to access it later. A permalink, also called a persistent or stable URL, removes any session-specific information from those URLs and is a reliable way to access the article or e-book section later.

A proxied URL will ensure that you and others in the Northeastern community can access the URL from anywhere, whether on- or off-campus.  It generally has ezproxy.neu.edu or a variation embedded in it.

Note: Scholar OneSearch also provides stable links (which change infrequently). When viewing a record, click the Link button to view and copy the link to that record:

Since these links may eventually change, we recommend checking them every semester, or if you are developing a list of course readings, use Leganto, our software that creates course reading lists and makes it easy to bring them into Canvas.  

If you know that your article or e-book is in one of the providers named in a tab at the top of this page, click on the tab to go directly to database-specific instructions. These are just a few of the most highly used providers, though. Most resources we have access to will provide permalinks. If you need help with a specific database, please contact us.

Skip the copy-and-paste altogether with Leganto, a resource list tool that integrates with Canvas. 

With Leganto, you can use your mouse to drag and drop the citations for e-books, journal articles, and more directly from the library catalog into your resource list, without worrying about managing links.

To get started with Leganto, open the tool link in your Canvas course menu:

For step-by-step instructions on syncing to Canvas and building reading lists, refer to the short video guides below.