SUNLINK – Find Everything But the Kitchen Sink!
What is SUNLINK (and Why Would Teachers Care)?
Florida’s school media centers have continued to build outstanding curriculum-related collections to support classroom curriculum, but with limited budgets they can’t provide all the needed resources for their students and teachers. That’s why over 80% of the public schools in Florida (over 2000 schools) have agreed to share their resources with each other through the SUNLINK program. The entire inventory of each participating school's media center is available online in an easy-to-use searchable format on the SUNLINK web page. You can search through the online database of resource materials from your own school or any other SUNLINK school in Florida, and now you can even request a loan of those materials via e-mail.
In this exciting Information Age, the availability of resources for reference materials is unlimited – however, the problem has become one of too much material to sift through to find exactly what is needed quickly. The object of the SUNLINK program is to help students and teachers find the information they need quickly so they can spend less time looking and more time READING!
So, SUNLINK is not just for media specialists! Yes, it’s the Media folks who have designed and developed this wonderful resource of a multitude of reference materials and curriculum enhancement tools – but who really benefits from all this? Of course, it’s the classroom teachers and students of Florida – and this SUNLINK system is a way for everyone statewide to share these wonderful resources.
One of the major features of SUNLINK is the index, or card catalog, of every resource in each of the participating school media centers - and all this is now available ONLINE! You no longer have to GO to the Media Center in your school to look for materials - teachers and students can now bring all that information to the classroom or home – it’s as close as your nearest Internet-connected computer. Imagine parents helping their children search through the media center’s resources from home, or having access to an electronic catalog of all your school’s resources from your own classroom.
You'll be amazed at what is available - not only the resources in your own school, but from school media centers all around the state. Teachers no longer have to ask their Media Specialist, “What do you have on the subject of…?” Now you can do that research yourself – including searching your own school’s media resources as well as over 2000 other schools within the state of Florida.
On SUNLINK you’ll find student-friendly screens with features such as an easy-to-use bibliography builder, cataloged web sites, full color images of book covers and the beginning of a new program for quick and easy InterLibrary Loans (ILLs) via e-mail.
Yes we are!
To search just our school on SUNLINK.
· Go to SUNLINK and from the main page, click on "Begin Your Search" and then click on your region (5), and then your district (Martin).
· At the main SUNLINK page, the location field should now show your district. Click on it to scroll down to see all the schools in your district that are SUNLINK schools.
To watch a tutorial on searching just SFHS from the SUNLINK main page
click here to download an .EXE file, then chose to run this program from it's current location.
May take a little time, but it's worth it!
SUNLINK helps locate materials for curriculum development and enhancement. If the materials needed are located in your own school, print a record or a bibliography and go to the school media center to check out those materials.
Generally, begin searches within your own school. Those materials will be easiest to access. However, there are times when a search of the district, the region, or the entire state may provide access to materials previously unavailable to you.
If you find materials you'd like to use that are located at another school in the district, region, or state, your media specialist may be able to obtain it through SUNLINK's InterLibrary Loan system. All InterLibrary Loans must be initiated by a school media specialist, and materials are loaned from one media center to another. Statistically, over 95% of all InterLibrary Loans have taken place within a district and materials are sent by district courier. Loaned materials from outside the district are generally mailed and returned via postal mail.
Please note: Not all materials can or will be loaned. Each school or district may have policies governing the loan of materials. Check with your local media specialist for details.
In the past, media centers requesting InterLibrary Loans from other schools and districts have had to use traditional methods of communication - telephone and postal mail - to submit their requests. Now SUNLINK is providing a new and much faster way for school media specialists to request loans from other schools and districts around the state - which will result in getting the materials into the hands of the teachers and students who need them even easier than ever. SFHS has applied to become one of these e-schools. We hope that it will be available next school year.
When you find a resource you wish to utilize that is located at another school or district, if you see an envelope icon beside the name of the school, that indicates the school is participating in SUNLINK's e-ILL program. Print this screen and take to your media specialist (or e-mail the web page! to your school media specialist) to process the request via e-mail.
To open HELP Click on the HELP button from the Search Page or click on the links below.
Use SUNLINK's Help section for:
- How to Search SUNLINK on the World Wide Web
- SUNLINK Search Hints
- Searching SUNLINK by Format, Language or Location
- Power Searching with SUNLINK: Using Boolean Operators (and, or, not)
- More Tips for SUNLINK Searches: Truncation, Wildcards and Specific Phrases
- Hypertext Searching with SUNLINK
Did YOU know all this was available online? Check out the new and improved online SUNLINK at: http://www.sunlink.ucf.edu/ .
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