We're still here

The academic year may have all but ended; the exams are over and the majority of the student population dispersed to the four corners of the earth, but the library endures. Don't think for a minute we're sitting back with our feet up drinking Earl Grey tea and eating Malteasers (it's actually ordinary tea and toffypops), your hard-working library staff have a variety of projects to keep them busy.

The annual stocktake is under way, in which we elucidate how many books are actually in the library. Allied to this is the weed of old stock, in which we decide whether we need that 1st edition of Exploring Corporate Strategy that was published in 1826. We're also thinking of ditching archiving our print journals to create a little more space in the library.

More ambitiously we're looking into the following (all, some or none of which may actually come to fruition):

RFID in the library. RFID stands for radiofrequency identification and is used for inventory tracking and management. Loathe as I am to link to Wikipedia, here's their article on RFID. For the benefit of the 3 readers of this blog who'll actually click that link, any RFID technology we use will be passive. What this will allow us to do is to expand our self-issue and return options.

PC and Study Room Booking. We are investigating methods of allowing students to book PCs and study rooms online by themselves, without having to call to the Issue Desk.

Virtual Reference Service We are hoping to pilot a virtual reference service whereby you go to the library website and chat with library staff via Instant Messaging. For an example of it in action, visit the UCD library website

Access Management This may be longer term, but we are investigating a single sign-on system for all DBS resources. It's called Shibboleth and sigh, here's Wikipedia's take on it. If implemented you will only need to sign in the one time to access resources such as Moodle, e-books and the library's electronic resources.

There's probably more, but I've either forgotten it, or it's so top secret, that I can't mention it in public.

Any news will appear here and also on the library's twitter account. See you in September! Alternatively, if you have left DBS, but are still interested in using the library, why not investigate our Alumni and External Reader Service

Online survey feedback

Many thanks to everyone who filled in our online survey and gave us their feedback on the new look library website and our range of online features and resources.

Congratualtions to Louise Byrne who was the winner of the €50 HMV voucher.


The survey responses gave us some positive feedback on the new look library site, for example; 62.3% of respondents are able to easily find the information they need from the site. 43% of respondents are able to easily identify the section of the site in which the information they need is located. Your preferred online library features are; the Library catalogue, electronic resources (databases), Webfeat (search all resources) and the AZ journal list.

We also got some good (as well as some strange and some utterly incomprehensible) suggestions for online features you'd like the library to provide. Here are just some of them with details of whether they are feasible or not, in some cases the suggested feature is already in place;

• Exam papers online - Exam papers are now available on Moodle (at least the last 2 years should be up for each module). Just log in to Moodle and go to the exams section then select the approproate department (Arts, Business or professional)
• Book reviews - Members of library staff write reviews of recently acquired material and add these to the library's monthly newsletter which you can find under 'library information/library news'.
  
• Booking study rooms & computers online - We hope to add timetabling software to the website in the new year.
• Ask a librarian instant messaging - We aim to set up instant messaging enquiries in the new year
  

And the two best suggestions...

• Access to JSTOR - We have been working to arrange access to JSTOR for some time and it is added to our budget for next year so (fingers crossed) we should have it in place early next year
• One password to access all resources - We have been busy battling with all our electronic resource providers lately to grant access to all our resources off campus via the 'search all resources' function using your student number and date of birth. Handy as this is, our long term aim is to have 'one ring to rule them all ' and enable student access to ALL our resources (PC's, databases, ebooks, library catalogue) using a single login. We are making steps towards bringing in institutional access to all resources using Shibboleth. This is a long term project involving the IT department and the library and we hope to roll this out as soon as logistically possible.