LearningExpress Library
LearningExpress Library provides a collection of interactive, online practice tests and supporting materials for many key academic and professional licensing exams. Create your own user profile in LearningExpress Library to get immediate scoring of practice tests, complete answer explanations, and personalized analysis of your results. Through LearningExpress Library you will have access to practice materials to the following:
- ACT Preparation
- Business Writing Skills Success
- Cosemtology
- GED
- Health Careers
- Civil Service
- Law Enforcement
- Math Skills Improvement
- Job Search and Success Skills
- Military
- Nursing
- Reading Skills Improvement
- Real Estate
- Resume and Interviewing Success Skills
- SAT Preparation
- Spanish
- Teaching Technical and Career College Skills
- TOEFL Preparation
- U.S. Citizenship
- Writing Skills Improvement
Online Materials Request Forms
The Online Materials Request Form is only for students enrolled in distance learning classes who live more than 20 miles from the NIC campus. Using this form, an NIC student may request books and/or articles be mailed out to them. If you attend classes on campus, please stop by the library to obtain library materials and do not use this form to make requests.
Library Tutorials
These online tutorials will provide you with a quick introduction to the library electronic resources.
Molstead Library video tutorial will show you how to use the Molstead Library Catalog to find books, videos, and CDs as well as give you an introduction to searching for periodical articles in the library databases.
The catalog tutorial will instruct you in how to search for books and make requests from U of I and LCSC libraries online.
The web site tutorial will walk you through the various links on the library web site so you will know your way around.
Then there are database tutorials that will show you how to search for magazine, journal, and newspaper articles using the periodical databases such as EBSCOhost and ProQuest. Click on the database below that you wish to learn more about.
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EBSCOhost is our primary academic database. It has broad coverage in almost all academic areas in the NIC curriculum. The first tutorial is a simple introduction to accessing EBSCOhost, finding articles, and managing search results. The second is a tutorial explaining extra features in EBSCOhost you might find useful. Click here to access EBSCOhost tutorial #1Click here to access EBSCOhost tutorial #2 (Macromedia Flash Player 7 required) |
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PorQuest is a popular database among our nursing and psychology students. It also contains a nice newspaper index and the Historical New York Times database with PDF images of the New York Times as far back as the early 19th century. The link below takes you to a nice 10-page color PDF that introduced you to using the ProQuest interface. Click here to view the Adobe PDF introduction to ProQuest databases |
The final tutorial is the 
produced by the University of Texas. This tutorial will introduce you to
essential skills needed for information searching on the Internet and in today's libraries. Three modules are presented with a quiz at
the end of each (results of which may be sent to an instructor's email address).
Distant students
For students who live far from the main NIC campus who are taking Internet courses or courses taught at one of NIC's sattelite campuses it can be difficult to access library resources. Click the link below for a complete guide to using NIC's Molstead Library from a distance.