Research Starters: EBSCO Discovery

Our EBSCOHost Discovery service is full of interesting features.  One such feature, and one that I had forgotten about, is Research Starters.  This can be loosely thought of as "EBSCO Does Wikipedia".  When enabled (which it is), it provides links to citable, authoritative summary articles on thousands of popular topics. It has, say EBSCO, been designed to assist users with their research, having been developed based on extensive studies with undergraduate and graduate students.  Well, there you are.

When a user conducts a search in EDS, a Research Starter (outlined below in red) may appear at the top of the Result List.  For those topics identified as most popular, Research Starters will retrieve relevant articles that link the user to related information and detailed bibliographies.  Which is nice.



Research Starters content is collected from a variety of high quality sources, both proprietary and encyclopedic, including:

• Salem Press
• Encyclopædia Britannica
• American National Biography 

If a Research Starter appears on the Result List, as in the example above, simply click the article title or the More button to read about the topic or find related articles and images.
From the overview article page, you can read the HTML Full Text article, listen to the article using the Text-to-Speech feature, or add it to your personal folder. You can also click the icons under Tools to print the article, email it, save it to your computer, etc.  Happy researching!

This post may contain traces of nuts and traces of http://support.epnet.com/knowledge_base/detail.php?topic=996&id=6951&page=1 

Trial our new database: EBSCO Leadership and Management Centre and tell us what you think!

Use our EBSCO Leadership and Management Centre database available at*:
goo.gl/xg8HPS

This database is available for trial only to all DBS students and staff, on and off campus until the end of 2013!

* For off-campus access, please use your login details
Students: student no. / date of birth (dd/mm/yyyy)
Staff: staff no. / staff no. + 000

If you’d like the Library to subscribe to it permanently, give us your feedback here:
goo.gl/HC8yIA

New resource: Passport GMID

Following on from our recent trial, I'm delighted to announce that we will be subscribing to Passport GMID for the next year at least. Passport GMID can be found at this link and initially will be available on campus only while we sort out access through Athens. Passport GMID will be replacing Marketline, for which some content (e.g country and sector reports) will still be available through EBSCO Business Source Complete.

Accessing electronic resources and e-books

Following up from chatting about passwords, I'll briefly talk about how to access electronic resources via the library website - and e-books  The library pays a lot of money to purchase licences for electronic resources.  These resources provide access to bibliographic data and full-text for journal articles, newspaper articles, books, company, market sector and country reports and so on.  Our licences restrict who can see the material, so we have to use usernames and passwords.

Electronic Resources
On campus, go to the e-library page on the library website.  Go to the subscribed databases section and look at the instructions for each resource. 

Off-campus, access to most resources is through EBSCOHost Integrated Search (but here, I'll call it EBSCO)

You should be able to access EBSCO from the search box on the library home page, the advanced search page or the e-library page where you access individual databases.  If you are off-campus, you will need to login with your student number and date of birth, in format dd/mm/yyyy 

If you try to login to EBSCO from elsewhere, say for example, after searching for EBSCO on Google, it is possible that the EBSCO page won’t recognise your DBS login.  In this regard any error message that you see is important.  If you see error code 102, it means you are entering the wrong DBS username or password.  If you see error code 101, this means that the login page is not primed to accept DBS usernames and passwords, and therefore somehow, you've done something wrong!  If you see another error code, contact the library.

If you access EBSCO correctly, you will see the following on the login page:

Dublin Business School

Login with your student number and date of birth (in format dd/mm/yyyy). If you cannot login, please contact the library

If you do not see this on the login page, you will not be able to login to EBSCO

E-Books,
We purchase the vast majority of our e-books through Dawsonera.  On-campus you don't need a login  to see them.  Off-campus you will need a username and password.  Usernames and passwords have changed over time.  If you are new to DBS your username is your student number and your password is your date of birth in format dd/mm/yyyy (we try, though sometimes fail, to be consistent!).

There are two ways of finding out what e-books you can access. You can use the search/browse facilites on Dawsonera, or you search the library's online catalogue.  On the catalogue click the advanced button.  The third search box you see has the title 'Media type'.  In the dropdown menu, tick  the box next to E-books. In the search-term box, type your search-terms and away you go.

There is another way to access electronic resources, but I'm not going to write about that right now, other than to say that it's called Athens and you can look for details on the library blog or the e-library webpage (or even the next post down).   

Minor Changes

Changes are being made to a few electronic resources around here:

Justis will shortly be available on and off-campus via the search box and the adversearch page on the library website.

The interface, ans the URL for Marketline is changing. For a preview go here (on campus only). More content will be available too.

The Warc interface is changing too. There will be new content, including Topic Pages, which will provide a short cut to retrieving relevant content allin one place. Each Topic Page will include the likes of selected research papers, case studies, company profiles and news. In addition, Warc Briefings will provide historical overviews, detail likely future trends and suggest further readings on particular topics. More news as it becomes available.

Finally for now, the online library catalogue will shortly receive a makeover. If you want to see what the catalogue will look like, click here

Database Trial - Financial Times Historical Archive 1888 - 2006

For the month of March, the Library has trial access to the Financial Times Historical Archive, 1888-2006 for the month of March.

This online facsimile edition of the FT is fully-searchable and offers the complete run of the London edition of the paper, from its first issue to the end of 2006. You can access this database either from college, home or work via username and password. To obtain login details go to 'Search All Resources' or contact the library


NOTE: Trial ends 1st April 2010.

A miscellany

Instead of playing solitaire during my tea break, I browsed some library-related blogs and saw the following links, which I thought are worth passing on:

Free access to SAGE journals online for the entire month of October. As it says on the tin - free access to SAGE journals online. You will have to register of course and give them an email address and a few other pieces of data - 3rd letter of middle name, inside-leg measurement, that kind of thing, but it'll be worth it. Quoting from the link:

SAGE Journals Online contains more than 260,000 articles from more than 500 SAGE journals* with content available from 1999-current.

Quick Search and Advanced Search interfaces are available. You can also browse by journal title.

* Some of the many disciplines include:

+ Communication & Media Studies
+ Engineering & Computing
+ Geography
+ Information Science
+ Management & Organization Studies
+ Pharmacology & Toxicology
+ Politics & International Relations
+ Research Methods & Evaluation
+ Sociology

2) Jinni - Film and Television recommendation database Self explanatory again. Search on plots, moods, people, keywords etc. You can even limit your search to free online content. More on Jinni here. It didn't find anything when I searched for "mutant space goats and zombies". Though it did find me 200 titles it thinks is similar to The Wire so I might have a look at some of those when I get a chance.

3) Online glossary of economic terms from the Economist Unsure of the meaning of Pareto Efficiency or Velocity of Circulation? Wonder no more by consulting this handy glossary of economics and economics related terms adapted from the book Essential Economics by Matthew Bishop from Profile Books.

4) Free e-books directory An ever growing list of freely available ebooks. Further comment superfluous.

Passwords - a reminder

At DBS, there are a variety of resources available to the student. Here's a gentle reminder of how to access what's available.

Moodle: Moodle is a virtual learning environment. Here you might find material pertaining to your courses. What's there though very much depends upon the individual lecturer. What's probably there though is previous year's exam papers for you to cast your eye over. If you're looking for exam papers, don't look on your individual course, click the exams link instead and look at the appropriate area e.g. undegraduate arts or postgraduate business studies. Unlike other resources in this list you define your username and password. To access Moodle, you need to have an active mydbs.ie mail account account. Go here to activate your account. Please remember the answer to your security question and please choose a memorable username and password. Our IT department will love you for it. Here's a nice tutorial on Moodle.

PCs and Printing: To login to a PC and to print, you will need to have a student account. Your username will be your student number and your password will be your date of birth. If you don't have have an account set up, inform our friendly and efficient information desk staff know, and you should be set up soon after.

WebFeat: WebFeat is what we in the library use as an access management system, to allow access to all our electronic resources off-campus. Again, your username is your student number and password is your date of birth. Bulk uploads of new users are done on a weekly basis. If you do not have a WebFeat login, give your student number and date of birth to our issue desk staff or email the library. A temporary login can be supplied.

Dawsonera: Dawsonera is our electronic book platform. This is a bit more complicated, so pay attention! If you started before January, chances are you are set up on Dawsonera with your username being your first initial followed by your surname, or your first name followed by your surname. Thus, if your name is Brian Cowan, your username is probably bcowan or briancowan and your password is your student number. If you enrolled in January or after, your username should be your student number and your password should be your date of birth.

Graduating this year but still want access to DBS Databases?

If you are a student due to graduate this year but still want access to DBS Library's resources including the Emerald and Business Source Complete databases read on...

DBS library's alumni package now includes access to the Emerald and Business Source Complete databases so you can keep up to date with publications and research in your field of study.

• The basic alumni package which entitles you to use the library after graduation and to borrow up to 3 books costs €75 per year
• The enhanced alumni package which entitles you to the above as well as login access to DBS Library's Emerald and Business Source Complete accounts cost €100 per year

See the Alumni section of the library website for an application form or email library@dbs.ie

Arts students, we havent forgotten about you - if you are interested in us adding Academic Source Complete or other arts and humanities databases to our alumni package please contact the library.

More free databases

A few more to mention:

Alcohol Studies Database: Contains citations of over 55,000 documents indexed by the Rutgers University Center of Alcohol Studies since 1987. The database focuses on scholarly and professional materials on beverage alcohol, its use, and related consequences. A small amount of educational and prevention materials and information on other drugs are also included.

Cogprints: An eprint archive of any sciences relevant to cognition, including Psychology, Neuroscience, Linguistics, many areas of Computer Science, Philosophy and Biology. The archive can be searched by author, title or keyword

Labordoc: Labordoc is the International Labour Office (ILO) Library's catalogue of its collection of books, reports, journals, and documents. It also includes over 350,000 references to journal articles, documents, online publications and hard-to-find material from countries around the world, giving worldwide coverage of labour, employment and related social and economic development issues. Labordoc provides multilingual (English, French, Spanish) access to specialised documents indexed and classified using the ILO Thesaurus. With its detailed abstracts, users can limit searches by main subject, by country or region, or by non-English literature, including original and translated versions of intergovernmental and nongovernmental publications. To find online full-text material, limit your search to location "electronic documents"

Project Guttenberg: Project Guttenberg is the largest single collection of free electronic books, with over 27,000 books available in its online catalogue and may be useful for subjects not so well-covered by Dawsonera.

pSearch: A customised search engine dedicated to philosophy-related web pages, searching only those web sites with online academic philosophy papers and authoritative reference sites.

Links to each of these have been added to the 'search all resources' page accessible from the library home page. None of these are searchable in Webfeat, but they may be of interest to some students.

Free Databases

We in the library spare no expense in the quest to bring you top-quality electronic resources, and indeed the case of the two databases I am about to describe, no expense is in fact required.
ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) is an online digital library of education research and information sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education. ERIC contains over 1.2 million bibliographic records, and full-text where available. However don't expect over 1.2 million articles available as full-text. Although the primary emphasis is on education-related content, the size of ERIC means it contains a lot of material on the likes of social sciences and psychology
Animated tutorials are available here
PubMed is a search engine for accessing MEDLINE, an online database of biomedical information compiled by the US National Library of Medicine. PubMed contains around 19 million records, most of which are citation only, but full-text material is increasingly becoming available, partly due to US legislation requiring inclusion into PubMed electronic copies of peer-reviewed research funded by the US National Institute of Health. Of interest to DBS students will be topics such as addiction research and psychology.

New(ish) databases

Following the success of our recent trials of Computer and Applied Sciences Complete (CASC) and Marketline, the library has purchased full subscriptions to these databases. Many thanks must go to the database vendors for giving us instant access to these resources. CASC, as the name suggests is an engineering, computer science (and related disciplines) database, with 500 journals and periodicals available as full-text. Marketline is a business information database with a wealth of information on companies, industrial sectors and countries. Data can be exported to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. CASC is available off-campus via WebFeat and can be searched in WebFeat. Marketline is not searchable in WebFeat, but can be searched off-campus via the 'Search All Resources' link on the library home page

Everything you wanted to know about WebFeat but were afraid to ask

A couple of points to mention about WebFeat. WebFeat is a federated search engine which allows you to search multiple databases at the same time, thus saving time and effort. We are also trying to use WebFeat to cut down on the number of passwords that students need to remember. Thus, having logged into WebFeat off-campus, you can choose to search multiple databases, or search your favourite database individually without having to enter a user name and password. For example, you could login to WebFeat and choose to search Emerald and Business Source Complete together, or you could decide to search one then the other. Before WebFeat, you would have to enter a username and password for Emerald and then a different username and password for Business Source Complete. Thus WebFeat has cut down on the number of passwords required. Ultimately, our aim is to have one username and password for everything you do in the library and hopefully we'll have some news on that during the summer.

If you were a registered student before Thursday 22nd January 2009, you should have a WebFeat username and password. Your username and password should be your student number and date of birth. Because of the way registration works, it's entirely possible (particularly if you are a Portobello student) that you don't have a login. If you don't please contact me or the Issue Desk. We aim to update user lists every Monday. Also, please note that a few students get registered with a few personal details missing. These details sometimes include the date of birth. If, for whatever reason, we don't have your date of birth, then it's not possible for your date of birth to be your password. In this case you have been given a default password, which you can get from the Issue Desk or myself.

So what's on WebFeat and what can you search? On WebFeat, you can search all of the following at the same time though if you need to do so, you must have a very interesting search lined up ;-) There is a check box beside these that you click in order to search in WebFeat:

DBS Library Catalogue
Portobello Library Catalogue
Academic Source Complete
Butterworths Lexis Nexis
The Economist
Emerald
Film and Television Literature Index With Full-Text
FT.com
Hospitality and Tourism Complete
Lexis Nexis News and Business
Mintel
Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing Archive
PsycARTICLES
PsycINFO
WARC

Also in WebFeat, there are links to the following databases that you can only search individually. In these instances, the check box is greyed out and there's a note in the database description field to this effect:

A to Z journal list
Dawsonera
Encyclopaedia Britannica (not available off-campus)
Firstlaw
Justis
mad.co.uk (not available off-campus)
Westlaw

In time, some of these databases may become searchable in WebFeat. We have left in a link, with is non functional at this juncture, for Computer and Applied Sciences Complete. We had that database on trial, which has subsequently expired, however we hope to purchase it (fingers crossed)very soon. We hope to purchase a couple more databases too, in which case we'll tell you about them here and elsewhere.

Finally, if there is a link to that database, it is searchable by itself. Firstlaw requires a username and password, which should be visible to you. If you want to search Butterworths or Lexis Nexis News, you will need a user name and password that you can request at the issue desk OR you can search these databases through Webfeat and click to view one of your search results. This opens your search result in the appropriate database. You can then search that database by clocking on the search tab, which if memory serves appears on the top left of the screen.

I think this is enough for now!

Federated searching in the library

According to the handbook for Library Trustees of New York State, federated searching is "ability to search several subscription databases simultaneously or to search a database, OPAC or the Web and some combination simultaneously". The library has recently purchased WebFeat, a federated search program that allows you to simultaneously search DBS and Portobello library catalogues and most of the subscribed electronic resources that we have. Thus for example, business students can search Emerald and EBSCO at the same time, while arts students can search Psycinfo and Psycarticles at the same time.

The WebFeat search portal also acts as a links page for nearly all of our subscribed resources. Note that off-campus, the usual usernames and passwords for electronic resources apply. Note also that Westlaw.ie does not yet work off-campus.

WebFeat can be accessed by clicking the "search all resources" link on the library home page. You will need a username and password (the same one as for logging into college PCs) to access WebFeat.

New Database Trials

Three new databases are accessible through EBSCO for a trial period:

Computers & Applied Sciences Complete
Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text
Communication & Mass Media Complete

To access the databases, please log on to EBSCO in the usual way (see the DBS Library Off Campus databases web page for more information) and click on the 'Trial Access...' link in the list of available databases.