Classroom available for study when library closed

Though the vast majority of DBS students have dispersed to Summer pastures, we are aware that some of our hardworking ACCA students still have exams in the pipeline.

Monday to Thursday the Aungier St and Dame St libraries alternate late opening until 8 PM as follows;

Monday - Dame St
Tuesday - Aungier St
Wednesday -Dame St
Thursday - Aungier St

Which brings us to Friday, when both AS & DS CLOSE AT 17:15

However, before you decry the possibility of studying on the street on Friday evenings...
to accomodate anyone requiring study space on Friday evenings we've arranged that a classroom be allocated for the duration of the summer.

Room AS 3.3
will be available from 17:15 until 21:00
every Friday evening until term time hours re-commence in Sept

The Aungier St building closes at 21:30 on Friday evenings so we would ask that students availing of this study space ensure they have vacated the building by this time so security staff can lock up.

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

Final year students, show off your skills, get a certificate and maybe win a €100 prize!

If you are about to graduate from DBS and would like an opportunity to get certification of the generic transferable skills developed during your course read on...

HETAC is inviting it's accredited institutions (including DBS) to participate in the Learning Outcomes Assessment.

This assessment will measure essential transferable skills gained during your time at DBS, for example;

• critical and analytic reasoning
  
• Problem solving
  
• Written communication

Skills are measured using several simple computer based tests. Only generic skills are evaluated so there's no need for any advance preparation.

Volunteers are invited to participate in this assessment which will take place on

Thursday May 15th between 2-5 in SWS labs 1.1 & 1.2

Anyone who has just completed (or is about to complete) a HETAC (ie non LJMU) accredited DBS Business qualification is eligible.

Whats the incentive for participants?
All participants will receive an individual certificate of their generic skills, a valuable tool in evaluating your core skills and marketing them to employers. Appointments can be made with the careers advisor to discuss how your scores influence your employability and long term job prospects.

If that wasnt enough, the first 20 volunteers will be entered into a draw for €100! Not a bad way to finish off your time here at DBS

Anyone who's interested can show up on Thursday at the above time and place or if you have any queries contact DBS careers advisor carol.clifford@dbs.ie for more details.

If you're reading this and know of any fellow students who are eligible and would be interested in participating, please do pass on the details.

Good luck to all!

Westlaw scheduled down time - 10pm -10.30 08/05/09

Just a little word of warning to any of our law students planning to burn the midnight oil on legal databases tonight.

Westlaw.ie will be unavailable from 10.00 pm until 10.30pm while they perform some routine maintenance. Full access should be restored after this time, so if you do log in during this down time, try back again after 10.30 and all should be restored.

As always, do let us know if you are having difficulty accessing any of our databases off campus (log in via the 'search all resources' button on the home page of the library website with student details) or if you are having problems locating specific material.

Free access to SwineFlu information on DynaMed via EBSCO

The Swine Flu pandemic has prompted EBSCO publishers (our vendors for databases like Business Source Complete, Academic search complete, Hospitality & tourism complete, Film & TV literature index, PsychArticles & PsycInfo among others) to provide their customers with free acces to Swine Flu information from the DynaMed medical database.

DynaMed offers an up to the minute reference source for medical practitioners and professionals and is a reliable source of practical information on the disease, its causes and diagnosis.

Anyone who wants to access DynaMed's Swine Flu information to learn more about the facts behind the headlines can do so by clicking HERE

Summer Opening hours from May 18th

Though we know many of you will want to put some distance between yourselves and the inside of a library once the exams are out of the way a small band of dedicated library junkies have asked about our opening hours over the Summer months.

So for those of you who are interested...

Summer hours will commence on Monday May 18th & opening hours for AS & DS library's are;



Aungier St
Monday, Wednesday & Friday - 09:30 -17:15
Tuesday & Thursday - 09:30 -20:00
Saturday - 09:30 -17:00

Dame St
Monday & Wednesday - 09:30-20:00
Tuesday, Thursday & Friday - 09: 30-17:15
Saturday - 10: 00 - 14:00

May Bank Holiday opening hours

Just a reminder that the three library sites will be open throughout the May Bank Holiday weekend. We will continue Sunday opening at the Aungier St library right up to the end of the last week of exams.

Hours for the Bank holiday weekend and remaining Sunday openings are;

Aungier Street	Dame Street	Portobello
Saturday May 2nd 09:30- 17:00	Saturday May 2nd 09:30-17:00	09:30 -17:00
Sunday May 3rd 11:00 -17:00	Sunday May 3rd 11:00-17:00	11:00 -17:00
Monday May 4th 11:00 -17:00	Monday May 4th 11:00-17:00	CLOSED
Sunday May 10th 11:00-17:00	Sunday May 10th -CLOSED	CLOSED

Classrooms available for study this week

It may have escaped your attention but exam season is in full swing and library study rooms are booking up fast.

To accomodate students wanting to do group study some classrooms have been made available again this week.

These rooms are available all day and do not need to be booked;

Tuesday April 28th - Bow lane - room 4.3
Wednesday April 29th - Balfe St block B room 1.1
Thursday April 30th - Balfe St, block B rooms 1.1 & 2.1
Friday 1st May - Bow lane rooms 4.2 & 4.4


Big thanks to Neus Fernandez the timetabling officer for making this classroom space available to students.

More RSS

Recently I talked about RSS feeds from the Financial Times. You can also set up RSS feeds from EBSCO for notification of new journal content or for updating you with search results.

Before you go any further, you will need to set up a personal account with EBSCO. Instructions for doing so are here. It's quite simple, honest. There's a link to the sign-page on the top right of every EBSCO page.

The results of any search you perform on EBSCO databases can be saved as an alert, which will update you when new content matching your search criteria is added to the database. Rather than dribble on too much, with various degrees of coherence, here's EBSCO's instructions on setting up a search alert, alternatively here's how to set up a journal alert on EBSCO, and finally for EBSCO, here's the low-down on how to set up an EBSCO RSS feed. Why type, when you can copy and paste links, eh? The one negative, for me, is that EBSCO RSS feeds are only viewable on newsreaders and not on homepages such as iGoogle or Pageflakes.

Edit: RSS feeds do work with homepage services, but not it seems if you are searching using Business Source Complete's Enhanced Business Searching Interface. So there

Moodle and exam papers: A gentle reminder

My spider sense is tingling. I'm not sure, but I think that there might be exams coming up. Ah, spring 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 a hopefully helpful image 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.

Most but not all recent exams are up there and more are being added all the time.