This blog has now moved to: http://chiunilib.wordpress.com/
Please update your favourites/bookmarks, and if you’ve subscribed to the RSS feed, please delete this one and create a new one at the above address (go to the above address and click on the RSS icon).
Thanks and sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, but the new interface has more functionality!
Microsoft have a beta (test) version of a scholarly search engine, called ‘Live Search Academic’, in the same vein as Google Scholar. The search provides access to scholarly journal articles, conference proceedings, dissertations, and academic books and is at:
The first thing you notice when viewing the results of a search is the way the screen is divided into two panes (this can be changed) - the left side has the results, the right side has a preview of the abstract, and changes as you hover your mouse over another result. The results should be easily exportable into bibliographic management software such as EndNote, and clicking on an author’s name leads to results of the relevant author search. Results can be sorted and limited by author, journal, and conference, as well as date and relevance, and the amount of data displayed per result can be altered by a ‘richness slider’ at the top. Clicking on any result may lead to the full-text of an article. The service is at the beta stage, so may develop further, but have a go and see if it’s useful for you. I’ve added the site to the University of Chichester Library link on Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/chiunilib/ ).
(Thanks to Sarah for spotting this one).
Del.icio.us is a popular social bookmarking website (some of you may already use it?), allowing users to easily access their favourite websites via the internet rather than having to rely on the favourites stored on their own PC. There are a number of benefits to using this free service, including being able to search across all the useful websites using tags (similar to keywords). The library services home page on Portia contains subject resources, where useful websites for particular subjects are grouped together, so I thought I would create a group on del.icio.us listing these useful websites and you would then be able to search them, using the tags, across all subjects. The listing is at:
http://del.icio.us/chiunilib (no username/password required)
The page has the websites listed on the left, and the tags, which can be viewed in different ways (including a ‘cloud’), on the right. The tags are keywords describing what the website is about. I’ve just started this page, so the list is quite small, but hopefully this will grow - with your help. If you find an interesting and useful (to your studies only, please!) website which you feel would be of interest to your colleagues, let us know (contact your subject librarian, or any member of library staff) and if we feel it is appropriate, we’ll add it to the list on the above website. Remember, the more response we get from you, the more useful the site will be to all of us. I particularly like the tag ‘cloud’ idea - keywords that have more websites attached are in a bigger font - visually interesting!
Welcome to all you new students. You will probably be busy finding your way around campus, going to the various inductions, and generally getting used to life at the University of Chichester. When things settle down a bit, have a look at what Portia (our online portal to our various services) has to offer, especially, of course (!), the ‘My Library’ tab. This leads to the Library Services home page, where you can find all the services we offer, including a link to the library catalogue (containing all the resources at both Bishop Otter and Bognor Regis campus), links to subject-specific resources, links to various electronic resources, and of course this blog. Stop by whenever you have a spare moment, and read about what’s new in the library, but in the meantime if you have any questions or problems just ask us, and enjoy your time at Chichester.
I’ve added a link to Google Scholar on the Electronic Resources page on Portia. To those of you who haven’t used this database before, Google Scholar contains access to scholarly literature on a wide range of subjects, and includes peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and articles from professional societies, universities, and other scholarly organisations. Being based on scholarly literature, you should find much more useful information on Google Scholar rather than by just performing a Google search, and results include some full-text. There is also an advanced search screen for more complex searches.
Welcome back everyone - hope you all had a great Summer.
So, what’s new? Well, we have a new version of Portia, a new printer/photocopying credits system, the library catalogue (Prism) has a simpler front page - have a look at my earlier posting: ‘Prism library catalogue has changed’, we now have Internet Explorer 7 with its RSS capability (see my earlier posting about RSS), and we all have to get used to using Microsoft Office 2007 (it’s great once you find where everything is on the ‘ribbon’) - here’s to a great year of learning new things!
RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ or ‘Rich Site Summary’. So, what does it do? Most people search the web and when they find a useful site which they would like to come back to, they either note the URL (Uniform Resource Locator - the ‘web address’) somewhere, or better still, save it to their ‘Favorites’ as a bookmark to come back to. Whenever you want to check if there’s anything new on that website, you would have to go back to it to check.
Well, with RSS, you don’t have to keep going back to the website to see if there’s anything new, the new stuff comes to you! Once you set up a RSS ’feed’ using a RSS reader, you don’t have to keep checking that website for new stuff, you just have to log in to your RSS reader and any new stuff will be posted there. Once you’ve read the new info, you can mark it as read, and hence keep easily up to date with all the new information whenever it’s posted to the site. As you can see, lots of time is saved by not having to keep going back to a website to check if there’s anything new, and there are many more benefits. You can set up lots of ‘feeds’ from different websites which all appear in one place in your RSS reader, and hence keep up to date with many subjects, news, etc.
To set all this up you need to find a website with a RSS feed - most news sites, forums, and blogs now have these. You can recognise a page with a feed by various RSS icons, the most common is this one:
but some just have the letters ‘RSS’, usually somewhere near the bottom of the page. You also need a RSS reader - there are many free ones on the web, lots where you don’t have to download any software, but you just have to register. This bit has now just got much easier with the new Internet Explorer version 7 - this has a RSS reader built in. The icon, as above, glows orange when it detects a feed on the page you’re viewing, so you just have to click on it and subscribe to the feed. Blogs are common places to find feeds, so how would you create a feed from this blog, so you wouldn’t have to keep returning to check if I’ve written anything new? Just click on the RSS icon on the toolbar of Internet Explorer 7 (it’s next to the home icon on the top right), which should be orange when you’re viewing this page, and subscribe to the feed by clicking the relevant link on the resulting page. When you want to view all the feeds you’ve subscribed to, just click the ‘favorites center’ star on the Internet Explorer 7 toolbar at the extreme left and click the Feeds tab.
You may have noticed that the front page of the Prism library catalogue (basic search), and the advanced search screens, have changed slightly since the last upgrade of the system. There is now just one search box on the basic search screen, as in the screenshot below, to make searching easier. You can type any keywords into the search box, including words from a specific title, words from an author’s name, words about a subject, or a mixture of any of these.
If you get no hits, try removing some of the keywords (you may have been too specific). If you get too many hits, add more keywords - try to be more specific, or use some of the limiters, such as year, or site, or do an advanced search. You can also enclose terms you know to be next to each other (such as “motor control”) in quotes (”) for better search results.
I’ve added a new database to the Electronic Resources page on Portia: Archival Sound Recordings. This database contains the British Library sound archive, one of the world’s largest sound archives, and provides access to sound recordings on a wide range of subjects.
All of the EBSCO databases on the Electronic Resources page on Portia (Business Source Elite, E-Journals, MLA International Bibliography, Professional Development Collection, SPORTDiscus with Full Text, and UK Reference Centre) now have a link at the top right of the screen called: ‘Ask-A-Librarian’. Clicking on this link leads to a simple form, requiring your name and email, where you can type in any questions you may have about the database, and this will then generate an email to the team of librarians, in a similar way to the Library Enquiries Online service.