Exam Period Sunday Opening

During winter exams, Aungier Street and Dame Street Libraries will be opened on the following Sundays:

13th December 2009
20th December 2009
10th January 2010


The Christmas break is scheduled from December 21st 2009 until January 3rd 2010 inclusive

Database trials old and new

Friday sees the end of our Safari Online ebooks trial, so today and tomorrow are your last chances to access any material from this resource. Monday Today sees the start of another database trial however, and this one is so cool as my son would say. It's Euromonitor Passport GMID (link only works on campus) and if I were a business student, I'd be excited about this, and even though I'm not, I still like this. Here's a description I've just been sent:

Passport GMID is an award-winning database allowing for in-depth research on established, emerging and developing global markets. Research is available on 80 countries for FMCG Consumer and Service industries plus granular macro and micro economic Countries and Consumers data for 205 countries.

Key features and benefits include:

∙ 9+ million statistics on Industries, Countries and Consumers
∙ 15,000 industry, company, country and consumer reports
∙ 12,000 company profiles and 8500 sector briefings
∙ 25,000 sources of further research information.
∙ Future Demographic reports illustrating which consumer groups will expand, decline or disappear in the future and indicating which countries offer the best prospects for business.
∙ Timely Comment from our own industry and country analysts on global events making the news.
∙ Consumer Lifestyle reports examining how people live their lives and factors influencing lifestyle choices. Topics include population segmentation, eating and drinking habits, income and expenditure.
∙ Strategy Briefings revealing major and emerging trends in consumer behaviour which will have an impact on sales and marketing of all consumer products.
∙ Global Risks and Vulnerabilities analyse opportunities and threats across 84 countries
∙ Students have improved employability prospects as this is the same data used by their prospective employers.
∙ International students have invaluable access to data on their home country and region
∙ Users have access to data on 95% of global consumer spending, making for unrivalled comparisons of business economies and consumer cultures

If you're interested in for example forecasting the pet food market in Finland or the retail sector in Hong Kong, then this is the database for you. Even if you're not, if you're doing a business or marketing course you should be able to find something of interest. This trial runs all next week, and I'll add a link as soon as it's active. Again, any feedback gratefully received.

Edit: Trial active.

Library Class Cancellations

Mark this in your diary: there will be no library classes the week beginning 30th November (St. Andrew's Day!) - thus the classes on the 2nd and 3rd of December are cancelled.

Electronic Reading Lists

On the library website, there is a page titled Electronic Reading Lists. You can find it under Library Resources. This page contains a list of all the module reading lists that have been given to us and a link to the library catalogue showing what books on those reading lists we have in the library. To illustrate, at the time of writing the first module is AC161 Introduction to Accounting. Clicking on that link, or indeed the link in the previous sentence, takes you to the library catalogue and searches the catalogue for books on the reading list AC161. Here's a wee screenshot:


Note that the library catalogue is searching the field "reading list" for the module code "ac161". We have added "reading list" to the list of fields that you can search in the library catalogue and moved it to the top of the list of fields in the advanced search option. You can search by module code or module title (module code is better as it will unique).
If you read this blog, or use the library catalogue online, you know that we have had some ...problems with the catalogue in the recent past. A side-effect of these problems is the "reading list" field a) being renamed "group" and b) being removed the top of the advanced search field list. Hence if you don't see "reading list" at the top, you will know that we had some problems with catalogue and have had to reinstall the software or something.
Two other observations: these are the reading that have been given to us. If we don't have any of the books on your reading list, it's 99.999% certain that your lecturer has not provided us with the reading list for this module (there is, at the time of writing a small backlog of 20 or so reading lists to add to the library website, but you should be able find your modules by searching the catalogue directly). Finally these are not the reading lists themselves, these are the books on the reading lists that we have in the library. If we don't have the book (yet), it's almost certainly due to the book being out of print, but we do leave no stone unturned in our efforts to find second-hand copies, no, honestly, we do.

Bank Holiday Closure

You will probably see elsewhere, but I'll say it here anyway: all DBS libraries are closed on Bank Holiday Monday 26th October.

School of Arts Library Day

People giving me content to add to the blog makes my life so much easier...





Library Day Workshops AS1.1:

Psychology 5.00-5.30
film studies 4.00-4.30
Journalism 3.00-3.30
Media & Culture Studies 2.30-3.30
Literature 2.00-2.30
Social Science & Social Studies 3.30-4.00
General Arts 5.30-6.00

1st Arts Activities

Another cut n'paste job, I love cutting and pasting. I don't however recommend it for assignments and dissertations though (think about it: if you can find something on Google, then so can your lecturer!). This time step up ....Orna Farrell: Take it away Orna, but first, what's a gumball rally?

Week 3 12th-16th October
Study skills & learning styles Wednesday 5-6 BSB 2.2
Basic IT Thursday 5-6 SWS1.3
Gumball Rally Friday 16th meet 2pm Aungier St. Reception

Week 4 19th- 23rd October
Basic IT Monday 5-6 & Wednesday 5-6 SWS1.3
Communications Tuesday 5-6 SWS3.3
Yoga Thursday 5-6 BSA3.2
Basic IT Friday 12-1 SWS1.3
Study skills & learning styles Friday 1-2 SWS3.3
Arts Library Day Wednesday 21st
1st Arts Night Out in Bojangles Wednesday 21st

Week 5 26th-30th
Communications Tuesday 5-6 SWS3.3
Yoga Thursday 5-6 BSA 3.2

All events are free to 1st Arts students but places are limited
Contact: orna.farrell@dbs.ie to sign up for the activities

More library classes...

It seems all I write about these days is about library classes and the library catalogue. I have managed to review this for the library newsletter though. Anyway I digress: trumpets please - due to popular demand, there will be two library classes per week. On Wednesdays, there will be a class for non-business students at 5pm in Aungier St. 3.1 and on Thursdays there is a class aimed at business students also at 5pm in Aungier St. 3.1. That is all.

Revenge of the Library Catalogue

In ongoing attempts to solve the problems with the online library catalogue (for instance, there were NOT 214 people using the library catalogue at 2.30am this morning), we have rolled back to the previous version of the catalogue for now to see if that improves matters. This has slightly different menu options; if you want to see your library account, click on 'Reader Info' to login.

Addendum: You can login and click 'Reader Info' to view your library account.
You may experience some problems with the advanced search option in Firefox.

A brief guide to resource access at DBS part 1

This post is long and dull, but will give some insight into how and why you access electronic resources at DBS the way that you do.
The A to Z journal list, incredibly enough, is an A to Z listing of all the journals, magazines and reports accessible through the library. Some, a very small number are subscribed to directly by the library and hard copies are available to browse or photocopy in Aungier St or Portobello. The A to Z entry for such a journal will say something along the lines of "Print copies available in Aungier St". The vast majority of journals however are only available electronically. Again, the vast majority of journals available electronically are via electronic resources to which the library subscribes. Because we pay money for them, we have a licence to use them. One of the conditions of the licence is that we grant access only to current students and staff. At DBS there are two ways of doing this:

• IP authentication: every computer linked to the Internet has an IP address - which allows the computer to communicate with the Internet. The library registers with the electronic resource provider a list of IP addresses which are allowed to access a particular resource. The only IP addresses that we know are the colleges own, so IP authentication is used to grant access to resources on campus
• Referring URL: when you click on a link to visit a web page, there's a lot going on behind the scenes; as well as the IP address of the computer, the URL of the page from which the link was clicked is also sent. This can be used to record information about visitors, but it can also be used to restrict access to websites. Access to DBS resources off-campus is by referring URL. The URL in question is the link embedded in the 'Search All Resources' image on the library home page. This page cannot be accessed off-campus without having first logged in with your username and password, hence it's reasonably secure. A small minority of users may have problems with I'll detail in part 2.

Consequently, when you access the A to Z journal list off-campus and click on a link to a specific journal, access will be denied because the referring URL, the A to Z journal list URL, is not recognised as one which grants access to those resources. If you're on-campus, your IP address is registered and so you get access.
I know what you're thinking right now: "Why don't you make the A to Z journal list a referring URL?" We couldn't do that unless we restricted access to the A to Z journal list. "So why don't you do that?" We don't so this because we firmly believe that the library, and library resources are marketing tools; we want potential students to see what we have available in the library, because we think that we have a very good selection of resources (your opinion of course, may differ) Making the list of electronic resources and the A to Z journal list publically available facilitates this.
Hence on-campus, you can use the A to Z to gain direct access to journals, off-campus you can use it to identify electronic resources where you can access the journal via 'Search All Resources'