Skip to Main Content
University of California San Francisco

Information Literacy for Health Sciences Students: Access to UCSF Library information

This library guide grew from the question "what should each UCSF health sciences student know about information finding and organization by the time they graduate?"

The utter basics

These steps will save clicks, time and aggravation. Saving clicks is good. Spare time is the best.  If you save your aggravation you will have plenty left over for the things worth being aggravated about!

Bookmark

On-campus

or in UCSF facilities:

  • Use UCSFwpa (UCSFguest is usually slower and it takes extra clicks to access the information that UCSF purchases)

Off-campus

  • You do NOT need to use VPN to access the library, You may lose access to some library content.
  • Use MyAccess. There are two ways to do this:
    • Go to library.ucsf.edu when you start an information finding session, click on anything (almost) and you will be prompted to log in with your MyAccess credentials
    • If you forget to do this and then find some publisher wants to charge you $50 for access to the fulltext of an article, click on Reload via EZproxy!
    • What is this EZproxy thing you speak of?
      • Click on Help Center on the Library Homepage
      • Find Using the EZproxy bookmarklet and click on that link
      • Find the orange rectangle which says Reload via EZproxy and drag that to the bookmarks tool bar on your browser. When you encounter a "paywall" in the future click on Reload via EZproxy and you will be asked to sign in with MyAccess

OK... Now you are ready for the next steps...