Athens

I've spoken before about how to access the library's electronic resources. Having looked at it, you may think, correctly, that it's a little complicated and that's fair enough.  A simpler way to access the library's resources is to get an Athens account.  Athens is an access management system that provides seamless, one-click access to the library's electronic resources.  To acquire an account, contact the library (by email) with your student number and your course code. Accounts are created in bulk, once per day, in the late afternoon.  Please don't mail the library first thing in the morning and then phone to complain 30 minutes later that you haven't received your account details.

When your account is created, you will receive an email with the subject line 'Your Athens account has been created' (or similar).  Follow the instructions in the mail to activate your account.  Your username is dbs followed by your password.  Hence if your student number is 1234567, your Athens username is dbs1234567.  When you activate your account, you get to choose a password, please make it memorable!

If you forget your password, you can go to this link

Forgotten Athens password

Enter your Athens username, (don't forget the dbs before your student number), the email associated with the account (the email account to which the initial Athens notification email was sent) and click ‘submit’.  The Athens people will send you an email that will contain a link to a page where you can reset your password.  If you have any difficulties, contact the library.

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).   

Free Emerald Resource: Research in the News

I've been on holiday (it's great, I recommend holidays) and have lots of emails to catch up on. One such email is from Emerald and tells me about a new free resource: Research in the News Rather than use my own words to obfuscate, here's Emerald's very own description:

This new online resource highlights research that has direct impact or implication in the real world. Featuring a monthly selection of three to four articles/book chapters whose subject area is either very topical and/or groundbreaking, this resource demonstrates the real-world, practical application of Emerald content. Articles and book chapters are freely accessible for a month until they are replaced by the next selection of highly topical content.

Such eloquence! The good thing about this is that it will give you access (for a while) to Emerald material to which we don't subscribe, so hopefully there'll be a decent selection available each month.

Temporary free access to Cambridge Online Journals

Free access to Cambridge Online Journals for the next 6 weeks

I'll let them say it themselves

In order to reach out to new readers, who may not enjoy access to high quality scientific and academic research, all 2009 and 2010 content on Cambridge Journals Online (CJO) will be made free to access between 15th July and 30th August 2011.

We hope this period of free access enables researchers, students and interested individuals to benefit from some of the world’s most valuable academic content. It will also enable Cambridge Journals to study patterns of usage and formulate improvements to CJO which will benefit all users of CJO going forwards.

To access the free articles, simply use the ‘Browse Journals’ or ‘Search’ options at the top of this page. To take advantage of all CJO functionality, including the ability to bookmark papers and save your searches, please register here.

Check it out.

EBSCO Integrated Search (EHIS) update

For the benefit of amnesiacs and new readers, EBSCOHost Integrated Search (EHIS) is replacing WebFeat ('Search All Resources' on the library home page)as our federated search software and our off-campus access to electronic resources platform. WebFeat is still available as we wait for all our databases to be made available on EHIS.

We are making good progress however, with the number of databases available to be searched (and therefore available off-campus) on EHIS Now available are:
ft.com
WARC
Lexis Nexis Legal (Butterworths All England Law Reports)

If you're interested in using EHIS, you can click here and login with your student number and date of birth. Even if you can't login to WebFeat, you almost certainly should be able to login to EHIS and if your date of birth doesn't work, then login with your student number as both username and password. Currently databases available on EHIS are:

Academic Search Complete
All England Law Reports (Lexis-Nexis Legal)
Britannica Online
Business Source Complete
Computers & Applied Sciences Complete
Emerald
ERIC
Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text
Financial Times.
First Law (Ireland)
GreenFILE
Hospitality & Tourism Complete
JSTOR
Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts
Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts with Full Text (Trial)
MarketLine
PEP Archive
Regional Business News
PsycARTICLES
PsycINFO
PubMed
SocINDEX with Full Text (Trial)
WARC

We're still waiting for Mintel, Westlaw and Lexis Nexis (news), not to mention the libraty catalogue too

LinkSource trial now active

By pressing lots of buttons and clicking lots of links I've managed to get this up and running. We have three database providers connected - EBSCO, Emerald and JSTOR. As I said last week if you search a database and find only a citation for an article of interest, there'll now be a link you can click to see if full-text is available from another database. The trial will run for a couple of months and hopefully make it easier for you to find full-text articles

Coming soon: LinkSource demo

A common gripe of students, and one that is entirely fair and reasonable is "if I search database A and I find an article that I want to read, but the full-text isn't available, is there any easy way of finding the full-text without looking in databases B, C or D?" Now, hopefully we have an answer to that coming soon. EBSCO, who host a variety of databases that we subscribe to, have a product entitled LinkSource. LinkSource is what is a known as a link resolver. A link resolver is basically the answer to the gripe above. A more technical definition would be: software that takes a scholarly citation formatted as an OpenURL (don't ask, but if you must it's a metadata standard heavily used by libraries to mediate linking from information resources. Happy now?) and gives the user various things they can do with it, such as access full text, make an ILL request, get it from the library stacks, search Google Scholar and so on. The bit that you'll be interested in is "access full-text". As an example, suppose you are searching for material on hedge funds on Business Source Complete and find an article from the "Journal of Investment Compliance" you really want to read. No full-text is from this journal is available on Business Source Complete, but with the addition of LinkSource, you'll see a link that will take you to the the full text of this article (on Emerald, for what it's worth). If I can get it set it up correctly, I'll let you know when it's working

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.

New Database - JSTOR

I'm very pleased to welcome JSTOR to the list of electronic resources to which DBS Library subscribes. I shall shamelessly plagiarise* from wikipedia the following paragraph:

JSTOR (short for Journal Storage) is a United States-based online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions.

JSTOR is slightly different from other electronic resources that we have; it's a not-for profit service and more pertinently for our students, access to journals is embargoed, which means there's a significant time delay on access to full-text of nearly all JSTOR journals, agreed upon with individual publishers, but normally 3-5 years. Most journals have a "moving-wall" embargo, which is a delay between what's on JSTOR and the current issue of the journal, but 3 publishers operate a fixed-wall, with no new content being added to JSTOR after a certain date.
JSTOR has an arts-based bias, with arts here being a catch-all term for social sciences, humanties and law. It has a good reputation and provides some social cachet. We might be, thus far, the only private college in Ireland, if not the world with a subscription to JSTOR.

For now access is restricted to on-campus only until we sort out off-campus authentication issues. When that happens we'll inform you.


* Actually since I'm quoting the source and linking to it, this doesn't qualify as plagiarism, but I digress...

A very brief guide to resources, logins and passwords

Around this time of year, I and other library staff spend a lot of time passing on details on how to login to various resources on and off-campus. Here follows a very terse guide to what you can login to and how in no particular order:
Library Catalogue Here you can browse and search the library catalogue. You don't have to login to be able to do that, but if you want to manage your account - see your current and previous loans and charges and renew and reserve books, you will need to login. You login with your student number and a 4 digit PIN. To get a PIN you need to contact library: in person, by phone, by e-mail or using the all-new Ask A Librarian service.
DBS Computers: To login to a computer (on the student network!) at DBS, you need a username and password. Your username is your student number and when you first login, your student number is also your password, but you will be asked to change your password before you can proceed. Try to choose something memorable. The same combination also controls access to the print management system.
Moodle: is what's known as a virtual learning environment, which can supplement what you see and hear in your lectures. If nothing else, Moodle is very useful because its the online repository for most DBS exam papers. I'm very happy (honestly, I am) to say that Moodle is nothing to do with the library, and the following information is provided as a public service only. If you have any problems with Moodle, contact our IT department. You are responsible for your Moodle login and password. To set up a Moodle account, you need to activate your mydbs.ie email account. Do this by going to Windows Live and entering your student number@mydbs.ie as the username and your date of birth as your password. Follow on-screen instructions. A handy wee tutorial is available to assist here.
Search All Resources: The library subscribes to a number of elecrtonic resources that provide bibliographic and full-text access to newspapers journals and books. These can be accessed off-campus by clicking the graphic on the library website home page. You login again with your student number and date of birth. If you are a new student you may have to contact the library to gain access to this resource off-campus.
E-books: many (well, some) of the textbooks available in the library also come in pdf format that can be read online or downloaded (terms and conditions apply). If you started before January 2009, try using your name as your username and your student number as your password. If your name is Clark Kent and you started before January 2009, your user name is probably clarkkent or ckent and your password is your student number. If you started January 2009, your username is your student number and your password is your date of birth. If you can't login, contact the library.

I'm off for a cup of tea now.

Website feature of the day - Webfeat /Search all resources

Want to search across all the library’s resources at once?

Clicking the ‘search all resources’ button on the home page of the website brings you into a full list of all the library’s resources (catalogues, databases and ebooks). Enter your search terms, select a date range & the resources you want to search across to access all the library’s holdings on the topic in seconds.

Off campus Webfeat provides access to all the Library’s electronic resources. Login through the ‘search all resources’ button using your student number & date of birth to reach the list of resources & search all or select the individual database you want to browse.