Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Library class - change of location for Wednesday 16th Dec.
Tonight library class will take place from 5pm until 6pm in room AS1.1 and not AS3.1 as first advertised.
Thursday, 10 December 2009
Sunday opening commences
Just a reminder that the library will be opening this and the following Sunday from 11am to 5pm.
Library Class Cancellation
Tonight's library class is unfortunately cancelled. Apologies for the inconvenience.
Tuesday, 8 December 2009
It's Trial Tuesday!
Crikey, database trials are like buses, you wait ages for one then several come along at once. In addition to the link resolver, we have, until 31st January, LISTA full text and SocINDEX. Shanelessly cribbing from EBSCO:
Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts with Full Text indexes more than 500 core journals, more than 50 priority journals, and 125 selective journals; plus books, research reports and proceedings. This database also contains full text for more than 240 journals. Subject coverage includes librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management and more. Coverage in the database extends back as far as the mid-1960s.
SocINDEX with Full Text is the world's most comprehensive and highest quality sociology research database. The database features more than 2,066,400 records with subject headings from a 19,750+ term sociological thesaurus designed by subject experts and expert lexicographers. SocINDEX with Full Text contains full text for 777 journals dating back to 1908. This database also includes full text for more than 820 books and monographs, and full text for 13,947 conference papers.
Watch out for the LinkSource graphic, which may or may not indicate the presence of full-text elsewhere:
Available on and off-campus until 31st January. The more usage you make of these databases, the more likely we'll (make great attempts to) purchase them. Now I must go and make sure that these databases are available off-campus.
Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts with Full Text indexes more than 500 core journals, more than 50 priority journals, and 125 selective journals; plus books, research reports and proceedings. This database also contains full text for more than 240 journals. Subject coverage includes librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management and more. Coverage in the database extends back as far as the mid-1960s.
SocINDEX with Full Text is the world's most comprehensive and highest quality sociology research database. The database features more than 2,066,400 records with subject headings from a 19,750+ term sociological thesaurus designed by subject experts and expert lexicographers. SocINDEX with Full Text contains full text for 777 journals dating back to 1908. This database also includes full text for more than 820 books and monographs, and full text for 13,947 conference papers.
Watch out for the LinkSource graphic, which may or may not indicate the presence of full-text elsewhere:
Available on and off-campus until 31st January. The more usage you make of these databases, the more likely we'll (make great attempts to) purchase them. Now I must go and make sure that these databases are available off-campus.
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
Monday, 7 December 2009
Library News and Recent Acquisitions - November
In the interests of disseminating library information through as many channels as possible, here's the library newsletter for November and here's a list of books and other materials purchased by the library in the month of November. Not much more needs to be said, but if there's any books or other materials you'd like to see appear on any future list of recent acquisitions, please contact the library.
Friday, 4 December 2009
Library survey 2009 - Win a €100 HMV voucher!
Don't forget to log on to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/F38PJQF and fill in this year's library survey.
It's your chance to give us your feedback on the library services at DBS and maybe win a €100 HMV voucher!
Thanks a lot and see you at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/F38PJQF!
It's your chance to give us your feedback on the library services at DBS and maybe win a €100 HMV voucher!
Thanks a lot and see you at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/F38PJQF!
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
Repost: Moodle and exam papers: A gentle reminder
It's good to recycle, so here's a blog post I republish every so often. It's merely coincidence I do so in the lead up to exams...
My spider sense is tingling. I'm not sure, but I think that there might be exams coming up. Ah, exam time and a young student's fancy turns to finding previous exam papers and pretty damn quickly too. If you're looking for previous exam papers, don't ask library staff, yet. Look on Moodle instead. Exams have a course category to themselves and are visible on the main page, the one that appears after you login. Scroll down and exams are at the bottom. Here's the link to the exams. You will have to login first, but once you do, you will go straight to the exams page. There are 7 different categories:
Law
Postgraduate Arts
Professional School
School of English
Postgraduate Business Studies
Undergraduate Arts
Undergraduate Business
To activate your Moodle account, you will need to activate your @mydbs.ie mail account. To do that, go to Hotmail, enter your student number and date of birth and follow the prompts. If you have any problems with Moodle, or setting up your mydbs.ie mail account, you'll need to contact our IT department.
Most but not all recent exams are up there and more are being added all the time.
Good luck, again
My spider sense is tingling. I'm not sure, but I think that there might be exams coming up. Ah, exam time and a young student's fancy turns to finding previous exam papers and pretty damn quickly too. If you're looking for previous exam papers, don't ask library staff, yet. Look on Moodle instead. Exams have a course category to themselves and are visible on the main page, the one that appears after you login. Scroll down and exams are at the bottom. Here's the link to the exams. You will have to login first, but once you do, you will go straight to the exams page. There are 7 different categories:
Law
Postgraduate Arts
Professional School
School of English
Postgraduate Business Studies
Undergraduate Arts
Undergraduate Business
To activate your Moodle account, you will need to activate your @mydbs.ie mail account. To do that, go to Hotmail, enter your student number and date of birth and follow the prompts. If you have any problems with Moodle, or setting up your mydbs.ie mail account, you'll need to contact our IT department.
Most but not all recent exams are up there and more are being added all the time.
Good luck, again
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
Monday, 30 November 2009
Referencing resources
Students sometimes, understandably, struggle with referencing their sources. The referencing aspect of our library classes is very popular and basically we could run entirely classes on this subject. This post will look at some resources available to assist you with referencing:
Books: The library contains a fair number of books on referencing, most of which can be found starting with Dewey number 808. Clicking this will find most of them
Guides: There are a number of guides - on the library website - and elsewhere on referencing conventions. Here's the library guide to referencing, and here's a couple of podcasts on Harvard and APA referencing we created ourselves. Externally, most academic library sites have referencing guides, but we have long recommended those of Curtin University, Australia for their completeness. We also recommend the referencing section of The APA cribsheet for APA referencing guidelines.
Reference Generators: You can do pretty much anything online these days, so why not generate your references online too? Bibme is an automated reference generator for APA, MLA, Chicago and Turabian formats. Free registration allows you to create and save entire bibliographies online. Harvard format reference generated has been promised for a while now but has not yet appeared. A similar service is provided by Easybib, which only offers free trials to students. Similar to Easybib is Noodlebib which allows you to create a couple of citations for free. None of these support Harvard referencing, but you can create Harvard citations using Neil's Toolbox Harvard Reference Generator The Neil's Toolbox site looks quite interesting, including as it does a Plagiarism Tester and something called a "Lazy Researcher"
The library also recommends Zotero a fantastic add-on for the Firefox web browser. What do you mean you don't use Firefox? Zotero is a web-based reference management system akin to EndNote and Reference Manager (except that it's free). On similar lines to Zotero, except that it's not a Firebox add-on is Connotea
No matter what you do and what you use. Note the following:
1. Always cite your sources
2. Don't get bogged down in trivialities pertaining to punctuation or font styles. The bottom line, and the rationale for referencing, is: can the reader easily retrieve material that you reference?
3. Be consistent - adopt a style and stick with it; you may lose marks if your referencing jumps between formats.
Books: The library contains a fair number of books on referencing, most of which can be found starting with Dewey number 808. Clicking this will find most of them
Guides: There are a number of guides - on the library website - and elsewhere on referencing conventions. Here's the library guide to referencing, and here's a couple of podcasts on Harvard and APA referencing we created ourselves. Externally, most academic library sites have referencing guides, but we have long recommended those of Curtin University, Australia for their completeness. We also recommend the referencing section of The APA cribsheet for APA referencing guidelines.
Reference Generators: You can do pretty much anything online these days, so why not generate your references online too? Bibme is an automated reference generator for APA, MLA, Chicago and Turabian formats. Free registration allows you to create and save entire bibliographies online. Harvard format reference generated has been promised for a while now but has not yet appeared. A similar service is provided by Easybib, which only offers free trials to students. Similar to Easybib is Noodlebib which allows you to create a couple of citations for free. None of these support Harvard referencing, but you can create Harvard citations using Neil's Toolbox Harvard Reference Generator The Neil's Toolbox site looks quite interesting, including as it does a Plagiarism Tester and something called a "Lazy Researcher"
The library also recommends Zotero a fantastic add-on for the Firefox web browser. What do you mean you don't use Firefox? Zotero is a web-based reference management system akin to EndNote and Reference Manager (except that it's free). On similar lines to Zotero, except that it's not a Firebox add-on is Connotea
No matter what you do and what you use. Note the following:
1. Always cite your sources
2. Don't get bogged down in trivialities pertaining to punctuation or font styles. The bottom line, and the rationale for referencing, is: can the reader easily retrieve material that you reference?
3. Be consistent - adopt a style and stick with it; you may lose marks if your referencing jumps between formats.
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