New trial: EBSCO e-book business collection

For the next month, well, until 5th December, we are trialling EBSCO's eBook Business Collection.  This collection includes over 12,000 e-books on subjects such as marketing, finance, supply chain management and entrepreneurship and also focusing on career growth, personal development, communication and networking.

Here's a title list  eBook Business Collection Title List

This direct link seems to work else content will appear via the search box on the main library page.  

Kindles for loan!

On top of all the other changes we made during the summer,  we’re now branching out into lending Kindle e-Book Readers.

There will be five Kindles storing Arts based material and the rest will contain Business, Law and IT related e-books. The Kindles will be loaded with core and supplementary texts from your reading lists. 

They will come with a cover, charging cable and portable envelope.  The Kindles will be available to borrow for one week periods at the Aungier Street and Dame Street Library desks, making their lending period similar to other items currently in the library collection. 

Some of the attractions of the device include access to material which is in high demand and the ability to borrow multiple books at once (no more heavy bags!)  Both students and staff will be able to borrow the items.  We expect demand to be high so take one out early not to be disappointed. 

Accessing ebooks on Dawsonera

We use Dawsonera as our ebook platform.  We like Dawsonera.  We like Dawsonera so much that we have over 1500 titles available as ebooks on this platform.

Recently, Dawsonera did sometime that has caused us a little inconvenience; they changed their password criteria.  Previously, we were able to set up students with their student number and date of birth as username and password.  After changing password requirements, this is no longer possible, as all Dawsonera passwords now need upper & lower case (capital and small) letters and numbers.  The process of setting up students with library. EBSCO, and Dawsonera is semi-automated.  The "semi-" part means that it is not feasible to create passwords for Dawsonera, so we don't do that anymore.  If you don't have a Dawsonera login, you can skip the next paragraph.

In addition to changing the password criteria, Dawsonera seem to be invalidating existing passwords.  I say "seem" because it doesn't appear to be happening to everyone, yet  If your password still works, then hurrah!  However, that may change in the near future.

I welcome back readers who skipped the last paragraph and ask, then answer the question "how do I access ebooks on Dawsonera?"  Simple, through an Athens account.  Athens is an access management system used to manage access to electronic resources. If you have an Athens login, you can access all of the library's resources off-campus, including Dawsonera, with one login.

To access Dawsonera through Athens, either

1)            Login to MyAthens
               Click on the Resources Tab
               Click on Dawsonera
               You will be logged into Dawsonera automatically
Or

2)            Go to the Dawsonera website
               Go to the Athens/Shibboleth login
               Login with your Athens details

The next question then is "how do I get an Athens account?".  Contact the library - email is best for this purpose, and include your student number.  You should receive two emails, one will basically be an acknowledgement of your request sent by the library, the second will be sent by Athens and contain your account details.  If you don't receive the acknowledgement and/or the account details email, do contact the library again - and don't leave it too long before doing so. 

        

Dawsonera

Don't say we didn't warn you... Dawsonera

is pleased to announce the imminent arrival of the new dawsonera Reader Portal. Offering an enhanced user experience through a completely redesigned interface, with enhanced search results, refinement and save search functions, dawsonera now takes content discoverability to a new level. For the first time dawsonera will offer a choice in procurement models, opening the platform up to previously restricted content and more core textbooks. Social sharing through integrated Facebook and Twitter feeds will connect study groups and promote title discovery, and with “my bookshelf”, “recently viewed” and “my notes” options, ebook based research has never been easier.

Coming soon. More information as it becomes known

And more trials

We've gone trial-mad at library towers (and we're not finished yet). Our Academic Complete ebook trial is extended until the end of January. Remember ebrary from November? Scholarly e-book database? Read these online or download either chapters (40 pages maximum) as imaged PDFs (so no cutting and pasting) or as Adobe Digital Editions format documents? Of course you remember. And you also remember that you need download the free Adobe Digital Editions software before you can use this format. You also remember that and you can't read these on your Kindle, but you'll be able to read them on most other devices. We never did add them to the library catalogue, but if we do purchase any titles we'll add them to the library catalogue. I'll just confirm the link for ebrary shortly.

Until 9th February - a two week extension we also have a trial of JustCite, "an innovative legal citator", or, in other words a legal research platform brought to you by the creators of Justis. It's a a legal search engine, with built-in citation index functionality, that focuses on case law and legislation from common law jurisdictions around the world. I imagine it will be very useful to you if you're a law student.

As ever, terms and conditions apply - which means ebrary and JustCite are only available on campus.

 Edit *** The ebrary link As ever your feedback is greatly appreciated

Dawsonera e-book - outage on Sat. 8th Dec. 2012

On Saturday 8th December 2012, our e-book provider Dawsonera will be performing an essential upgrade on their web service and this will result in an outage between 10am and 6pm that day.

More resource trials

We've gone trial happy here.  Another two to talk about. As ever, they are available on-campus only.

Both come from the nice people at Pro-Quest.  The first is Academic Complete, an award-winning scholarly e-book database, yeah, more ebooks.  You can read these online or download them, either chapters (40 pages maximum) as imaged PDFs (so no cutting and pasting) or as Adobe Digital Editions format documents (for a maximum of 14 days).  You will need to download the free Adobe Digital Editions software before you can use this format.  Oh and you can't read these on your Kindle, but you'll be able to read them on most other devices.  However there's a large number of books to browse (+80,000) and we'll see about adding some of them to the library catalogue temporarily.  Academic Complete is available until the end of the month.

The second is the Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive which is:

The Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive is an archival research resource containing the essential primary sources for studying the history of the film and entertainment industries, from the era of vaudeville and silent movies through to 2000. Includes the core US and UK trade magazines covering film, music, broadcasting and theater are all included, together with film fan magazines and music press titles. Magazines have been scanned cover-to-cover in high-resolution color, with granular indexing of all articles, covers, ads and reviews.

That's sound's good, doesn't it?

All feedback on these resources gratefully accepted. And in case you didn't get the links, here they are again

Academic Complete

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive

Bookboon.com ; free academic e-books

Bookboon are an outfit based in London who, well you might have worked it out from the title, but in case you didn't, produce free academic textbooks in pdf format. They are all written by academics, so you'd expect them to be trustworthy.  Simply register an email address for their newsletter, tell them whether you work or study  and what you study or work at and then download the pdf.  What's the catch you ask.  Well, the only catch if you want to call it that, is that advertisements punctuate the texts.  To be fair, they're not that intrusive, as they generally appear at the end of chapters and are not too garish and the books are written by specialists in their fields, so why not take a look 

The Directory of Open Access Books

As the name suggests, there is a relationship with the Directory of Open Access Journals and as the name further suggests it's a directory of free full-text academic e-books, and its main purpose is to improve the visibility and discoverability of open access textbooks.  I've no idea if it's of any use to you, but it's certainly worth a look and of course new titles will be added all the time, so even if you can't find anything you want to peruse, you can try again at a later date. As I type, the directory contains links to 756 books, but that number will only increase  Go here to have a look.      

Netlibrary ebook & audiobook trial

Stop me if you've heard this one before, but the nice people at EBSCO have given us trial access to their Netlibrary ebook and audiobook platform.  Take it away EBSCO!

Containing around 500 of the 350,000 eBook/eAudiobook titles, this trial will allow you to view the functionality and features of subscribing to eBooks/eAudiobooks via EBSCOhost, including:
• Cross-searching databases and eBooks together to get a single Results list (within EHIS or for EBSCO only products)
• Download eBooks to Apple devices, eBook tablets and Mobile Phones
• How the EBSCOhost interface has been enhanced to handle eBooks, offering familar options to students.

The trial will be available until 16th December.  The links have been integrated into EBSCO, so when you use the library home page search box, your results will include ebooks and audiobooks (if they match) but if you like, you can directly access the ebook trial here, or if you prefer audiobooks only, click here  (off-campus,  login with your student number and date of birth. 

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).   

Passwords

Hello and welcome everyone to a new academic year.  For new students this can be a daunting experience (though we have an *excellent* student services department - if you are having any problems call into to see Caitriona), not made any easier by the number of passwords that you have to remember.  Here follows a list of usernames and passwords that you need.

Moodle, College PCs and checking your library account online.

To access these please enter your student number as your username and your student number as your password. If you are unsure what these are please contact IT or fill out their help form  or do both.  If you stop to think about, you'll probably realise that it's not a good idea to have your student number as both your username and password (it's a little like writing your PIN on your bank card), hence we strongly recommend that the first time that you login to a college PC, you change your password.  

Student E-mail  

Don't shoot the messenger here, okay?  I'm cutting and pasting here: 

To access your student email please enter your student number for your username and your password is the first 2 digits of your date of birth and your course code. Day of birth is in numerical format i.e. DOB 05th January insert 05 and the course code is as on your student card


When you log into your email it will ask you to change your password.

Any problems, contact the IT department as above.

Off-campus access to E-books and search results from the search box on the library home page

Use your student number and date of birth in format dd/mm/yyyy

Athens

If you want an Athens account, contact the library to have one set up for you.  You need to provide your student number, course code and a valid email address.  Within 24 hours of your request, you should receive an email with account activation details.  Follow the instructions therein to activate your account. You get to set your own password.  Any problems, contact the library again.

Access Free Sample Books on Project MUSE Beta Site

Project MUSE is very similar to JSTOR, so I shouldn't need to explain what it is. Anyway, they're redesigning their site, and until it goes live, on 1st Jan 2012 they're making available for free 300 e-books. There may be some books of interest to DBS students; happy browsing!

PS On campus, you may see the legend "Access provided by Dublin Business School", but don't expect to see anything other than free samples or Open Access material.

Calibre: e-book management

It seems sometimes that there are a myriad of e-book publishing formats, so what happenas when you buy device 'A' and try but fail to read an ebook in format 'B'? The answer? You download Calibre, which is a free open-source e-book library management application, that amongst a wealth of features, will convert from a huge number of formats to a huge number of formats and can automatically detect/create book structure, like chapters and tables of contents. It can also insert book metadata into a "Book Jacket" at the start of the book (I've taken this directly from the calibre website, - go there and read more). Calibre looks to be an indispensible tool for owners of e-reading devices, and it's free. What are you waiting for?

EBSCOHost ebook trial

We have an ebook trial on the go at the moment. Yes, it's an odd time of year for a trial, but that's out of our hands unfortunately. Anyway, EBSCO have branched out into e-books and so are offering access to a wide number of such books through their EBSCOHost platform. The trial can be accessed from any EBSCO database, from the link in the top right corner, cunningly entitled Netlibrary ebook trial (once it replaces the "Dublin Business School" text. To use an Internet acronym YMMV (Your mileage may vary); I don't know what's available; Gross's Themes, Issues and Debates in Psychology is there, but otherwise it's a bit of a lucky dip. The trial will run until July and should be available to you off-campus. Also as far as I can tell, a book can only be read online. If I discover otherwise, I'll let you know

A Friday afternoon posting about ebooks

We've been asked this question more than once, so here's a good place in which to answer it. Question: Is there any easy way of searching the library's ebook holdings - so that books the library doesn't own don't appear in the results list? The answer is there are two ways you can do this:

1. In the online library catalogue you can go to the guided or the advanced search and in the 'Type of Media' /'Media Type' drop down menu, select E-books. You can enter your search terms in the search box and only library-owned-books will be returned as results.

2.On Dawsonera itself, on the advanced search tab, there is a box "Include not owned". Make sure that this box is unchecked or unticked.



Another query which has come up on more than one occasion, is that students have difficulties reading ebooks online. There are probably a million different reasons for this. Here are two solutions depending upon OS and browser type:

1. Windows and Internet Explorer. If you see the error ""Internet Explorer has encountered a Problem and needs to shutdown", check if you have the quickfind browser helper object (BHO) installed. To read Dawsonera e-books, you should disable this BHO. Details on how to do this can be found here

2. If you are using Mac OS X and Firefox, you may need to install a PDF Plugin for Firefox on Mac OS X in order to read ebooks online

Dawsonera

Posts have been pretty thin on the ground recently as we are all very busy. Anyway, we have made changes to Dawsonera logins from last year and want to avoid confusion (no chance!)
If you registered before January 2009 and have never logged in to Dawsonera, please contact the library
If you registered after January 2009 and before July 2009, your username is your student number and your password is your date of birth in the format dd/mm/yyyy
Dawsonera then altered the way that we created usernames and passwords so that their software recognised the first slash in dd/mm/yyyy as some kind of end of line or end of field symbol, so instead of seeing dd/mm/yyyy as the password, Dawsonera sees dd as the password. Two character passwords are not allowed by Dawsonera. Hence if you registered between July 2009 and August 2010, your username is your student number and your password is your date of birth in format ddmmyyyy
Dawsonera then came up with a fix that allowed us to go back to using dd/mm/yyyy as the password, so if you registered after August 2010, your username is your student number and your password is your date of birth in the format dd/mm/yyyy.
Obviously we're not thrilled about changing passwords like this, but dd/mm/yyyy is easier to create and it matches up with logging into databases. Thank you for your considerable patience.

More fun with emails

We've been battling with our library management system for a few days now and have finally succeeded in generating PINs for new students (to use the the library catalogue online) and an email message to send to the student with details of the PIN (and a few other logins too). We'll be sending this message to all new students imported into our library management system

The email looks like the following:

Please do not reply directly to this email, please contact library@dbs.ie if you have any queries

Dear Student,

This email contains details of some logins that you will need to access library and IT resources at DBS

You login to library PCs with your student number as both username and password (you will be asked to change the password upon first login).

You can access our ebook collection at http://www.dawsonera.com with your student number as username and date of birth in the format ddmmyyyy i.e. with no slashes as your password

A new PIN (Access Number) has been generated for you to provide access to the online library catalogue at http://www.heritage.dbs.ie. To manage your library account online login with your student number and PIN.
The new PIN is effective immediately.
If you have any questions please contact the Library.

Your new PIN is:


You can access all other library subscribed electronic resources via 'Search All Resources' on the library homepage, with your student number as username and date of birth (this time in the format dd/mm/yyyy) as your password.

If you have problems with any of the above, please contact the library.

Thank you,

The Library

Aungier St. 01 417 7572
Dame St. 01 417 8745
Portobello 01 478 7667

library@dbs.ie

Free Ebook!

Smarta is an advice and networking resource for anyone starting and running a small business. To mark the start of a new decade, they asked some business minds how they thought the entrepreneurial landscape would develop over the next decade.

Entrepreneurs, marketers, investors, journalists and Dragons lined up to say why:

• The cloud would be nothing without the crowd
• Small is the new large
• This will be the decade of the mobile phone
• Apps are more than just a buzzword
• Green tech will be where the smart investments are made
• Collaboration is king

The results are contained in a new ebook, The smartest brains in business : 2010 and beyond, which is available as a free download (click the link in the title). This might be of interest to business students in particular.

Emerald ebooks trial

In addition to publishing some journals very popular with DBS students, Emerald have branched into ebooks. For the next four weeks we have access to their two ebook series collections:
Emerald Business, Management and Economics eBook Series Collection contains over 450 volumes from over 60 book series titles. Featuring relevant, international and trusted content in many fields including strategy, economics and accounting and finance. A list of titles can be found here
Emerald Social Sciences eBook Series Collection complements and extends the current Emerald portfolio, adding over 210 volumes from over 35 book series titles. Providing contemporary and high quality research, this collection contributes much to debate in the fields of politics, psychology, sociology, health care and education. Here's the list of titles.

Access is through the Emerald website, in the same way you access Emerald journals. The trial lasts until February 14th. Happy reading!