Friday 30 January 2009

Digitisation of course notes

All short loan course notes held in the George Green Library have now been digitised.

You can now search for course notes through the Library Online Catalogue (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/unloc) and download a digitised copy. One paper copy will still be retained in the library.

This will provide more accessible course notes for students.

New ebooks trial - we welcome your feedback

We have a trial set up for the Morgan & Claypool synthesis ebook collection until 28 February 2009.

What is the synthesis collection?
SYNTHESIS is an innovative and award winning e-book library of Biomedical, Engineering and Computer Science that combines authoritative content with advanced digital delivery. The SYNTHESIS platform includes e-books covering electromagnetics and antennas, signal processing and communications, biomedical engineering, digital circuits and more general electrical engineering.

How do I access synthesis?
Synthesis can be accessed via the eLibrary Gateway (Search under titles for Morgan and Claypool's ebook collections)

Subscriptions
Subscriptions are based on 8 subject collections or the whole collection. To see the titles in each of the subject collections, click on the "browse our subject collections" link on the right hand side.

Useful feedback for us would be whether you find particular collections more useful than others and the value of the collection for library purchasing.

The whole site can also easily be searched using the "quick search" option at the top of the page.

Please could you feedback any comments, either by commenting within the blog, or emailing Jenny.Coombs@nottingham.ac.uk by 28 February.

Friday 23 January 2009

Call for focus group participants for eBook project

Are you an engineering student or member of staff? Would you be interested in participating in a focus group to help formulate ebook publishing? If so, please read on...

The JISC e-Book Observatory Project (http://www.jiscebooksproject.org) is about exploring impacts, observing behaviours and developing new models to stimulate the e-books market, and to do all this in a managed environment.

The aims are to licence a collection of e-books that are highly relevant to UK HE course taught students, to evaluate the use of the e-books and to transfer knowledge acquired in the project to publishers, aggregators and libraries to help stimulate an e-books market.

Through statistical data and questionnaire responses, the University of Nottingham was identified as one of the higher users of e-books and has been asked to participate in the next stage of the project.

A team based at Aberystwyth would like to set up focus group interviews with academic staff and students in engineering who are users of the e-books in the MyiLibrary collection (engineering, business & management, media studies): http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/catalogue/myilibrary.aspx . These ebooks are available through our library online catalogue

The interview questions will be circulated beforehand, and the interviews will be recorded but quoted anonymously and so no institution will be identified. It is anticipated that the focus groups would be held sometime in February or the first 2 weeks of March.

If you are interested in participating, could you please contact Jane Maltby (jane.maltby@nottingham.ac.uk)

Tuesday 13 January 2009

Survey: Researchers access to information resources

CALLING ALL RESEARCHERS!

Can you spare 15 minutes to answer an online survey? The survey is investigating some of the obstacles you face as a researcher when accessing licensed information resources, and how you overcome these obstacles. The survey is part of a study, commissioned by the Research Information Network (http://www.blogger.com/www.rin.ac.uk), to understand the nature and scale of limitations and barriers encountered by researchers when seeking to access such resources. The survey is hoping to reach as many researchers as possible, across a range of
disciplines. Your input will provide vital insight to these issues and how they may be resolved going forwards. You can access the survey from 12th January here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=7Gm90P1n3aSLO87xHwvITw_3d_3d
Or email lburns@outsellinc.com

ticTOCs: keeping researchers up-to-date

ticTOCs is a new scholarly journal tables of contents (TOCs) service. It is free, easy to use, and provides access to the most recent tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals. It can help you keep up-to-date with what's being published in the most recent issues of journals on almost any subject.
You can find journals of interest by title, subject or publisher, view the latest TOC, and link through to the full text of over 250,000 articles (where our subscriptions, or open access, allow), and save selected journals to MyTOCs so that for viewing future TOCs. Free registration is required to permanently save MyTOCs. ticTOCs allows the export of selected TOC RSS feeds to popular feedreaders such as Google Reader and Bloglines.

Thursday 8 January 2009

Advance Notification of Changes to Intute - Health & Life Sciences


In January, Intute: Health and Life Sciences (HLS) will be introducing a change to the presentation of subject headings on the HLS Home Page.

The Bioresearch and Natural History headings will be combined into a single new heading: Biological Sciences. The content has been combined and is cross searchable but the browse structure will remain the same (with some minor modifications). These changes have been informed by user feedback and an Advisory Group including academics and a librarian in the subject area and the Higher Education Academy for Bioscience. In addition, Intute has improved the content, adding hundreds of new resources in the biological sciences.


The change will take place on Tuesday 13th January 2009. The new URL for Biological Sciences will be http://www.intute.ac.uk/healthandlifesciences/biologicalsciences/ The old URLs will be redirected to this new address.