Bath Spa University Library

Library refurbishment announcement

During the summer, the foyer of Newton Park Library is being refurbished to improve our services and facilities to the community.  Anyone who has visited us this week may have noticed that the current journals have moved to the Journals Room and most of the furniture and catalogue access points have been moved out in preparation.  The project aims to provide:

• Additional collaborative study space for students
• A bookable group study room for practising presentations, group work, library tutorials, etc.
• Improved location and visibility for the self-service machines
• New reception/help zone
• Laptop benching for short stay work
• Distributed Library catalogue access
• Improved décor, lighting and flooring

Obviously, we don’t have a lot of time until the new academic year but the Library and Estates are working very closely with our designers and contractors to achieve the majority of the changes in the time available.  The Library aims to remain open during the works but, inevitably, there will be noise and disruption in the foyer area for which we apologise in advance.

We look forward to welcoming you to a new look Library at Newton Park in the autumn.

New Electronic Resources

LION Literature Online

Over the last few months our electronic database provision has increased. You now have access to:

LION

Literature Online provides you with access to over 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, as well as 300 full text journals.

Empire Online

A collection of original documents relating to Empire studies, sourced from libraries and archives around the world.  They include exploration journals, periodicals, diaries, slave papers, maps and many others.

Illustrated London News Archive, 1842 to 2003

When it began in 1842 the Illustrated London News became the world’s first illustrated weekly newspaper, sparking a revolution in journalism and news reporting.  The publication presents a vivid picture of British and world events – wars, disasters, royalty, social affairs, the arts and science: in fact, its first issue covered the war in Afghanistan as well as the latest fashions from Paris!

In addition to this:

• Periodicals Archive Online has been extended from 80 to almost 400 journals covering the arts, humanities and social sciences: this includes the backfiles for Art Journal, Harper’s, Sight and Sound, Spectator and many others
• more Eighteenth Century Journals have been added to our collection, featuring periodicals from Chetham’s Library, Manchester, and the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

Welcome single sign-on

From next week Library and Information Services will no longer be supporting Athens accounts for students and staff. You can now access all of our electronic resources with your Bath Spa username/password, using the links provides on our webpages.

Refworks users

Some Refworks users have been confused by the single sign-on project. By removing Athens access we are not cancelling our subscriptions to academic databases, we are simplifying the way you access them.

Some Refworks users have also expressed concern that their data will be lost during this transition. This is not true; if you have difficulties migrating your data between accounts then please let me know. I will contact Refworks and make sure the transfer will be done for you.

Below is my new video, instructing users on migrating data between Athens/single sign-on accounts:

My contact details:

Matt Durant

m.durant@bathspa.ac.uk

Project MUSE

From January 1, we have access to Project MUSE.

Project MUSE is a unique collaboration between libraries and publishers, providing 100% full-text, affordable and user-friendly online access to a comprehensive selection of prestigious humanities and social sciences journals.

• There are no embargoes on journal content, the MUSE issue appears online before the print version.

• Journals are heavily indexed and peer-reviewed, with critically acclaimed articles by the most respected scholars in their fields. MUSE is also the sole source of complete, full-text versions of titles

• MUSE provides full text access to current content from over 400 titles representing nearly 100 not-for-profit publishers.

Project MUSE can be accessed by visiting their website,http://muse.jhu.edu/, Use your Athens username and password to access your institution’s online subscription to Project MUSE when not on campus. If you do not have an Athens account, please visit either of the libraries at Newton Park or Sion Hill.

Resources available on MUSE

• Receive email notification when new issues and new journals become available on MUSE.

• Install the browser plugin to be able to search MUSE from any page on the web.

• https://muse.jhu.edu/about/resources/guides/guide_intro.pdf

• http://muse.jhu.edu/about/resources/guides/guide_searching.pdf

Single sign-on

Testing for the single sign-on project is finally drawing to a close, with just one database left to resolve. We would like to thank the students and staff that took part in the testing, and are really appreciative of all the positive feedack we recieved.

What is single sign on?

Single sign-on is a way of accessing Library resources using your Bath Spa username/password. In the past students have set-up seperate ‘Athens’ accounts in order to access our resources from home. This would often become a barrier as passwords were very easily forgotten.

In September 2009 the University began testing a product called OpenAthens LA 2.0, which allows students and staff to access Library resources in the same way they would access Minerva or email.

Our sucess in testing this software has enabled the creating company (Eduserv) to use us a case study, presenting our success to potential customers.

In early April we plan to remove all Athens access to our resources, before enabling the single sign-on service across almost our entire range of resources. This may have some implications for Refworks users, for which the following blog post will provide some vital information.

If there are any questions please contact Matt Durant (m.durant@bathspa.ac.uk) or post comments below.

Our EBSCOhost services – available on your mobile!

EBSCOhost have now made many of their services available via Internet enabled mobile phones, allowing Bath Spa students to search and retrieve information on the move.

This means that Academic Search Premier, Business Source Premier, Education Research Complete, Theatre & Dance, MLA & SocINDEX are all available on popular devices such as the iPhone.

EBSCOhost Mobile has the following features:

• Basic Searching
• HTML and PDF Full Text
• Search Modes
• Limiters
• Image Quick View
• Image Collection (depending on the database that has been selected)
• E-mailing articles
• Preferences
• Multi-database Searching
• Branding

To access this service, please enter http://m.ebscohost.com into your mobile’s browser. You will need your Athens username and password.

For support on using this service, please visit the EBSCO Support site.

Import an informaworld citation into Refworks

A short video on how to import a reference from informaworld directly into Refworks.

Boolean logic

OK, time for some proper librarianship now.

Men in cravats…

 Mutton-chop whiskers…

 
This is George Boole, his strict Victorian values can help you use databases. 

Let’s just wait a moment for the students to leave… Bye! Have a nice time on Facebook. Don’t slam the door.

George Boole’s views on logic laid the foundations for all future databases, including – yes – even Google. One of Boole’s underlying principles is that there are several logical “operators” – “AND”, “OR”, and “NOT” – which determine the relationship between different variables or values, eg the words which you enter into a search engine.

The classic way to explain Boolean logic, seared onto the brain of every librarian since about 1974, is via 3 Venn diagrams. Imagine you’re writing an essay called “Shakespeare in the cinema – discuss the approaches taken by two different adaptations”. You then decide to search a database for journal articles…

By searching your database for Shakespeare and cinema, you’ll only retrieve journal articles that mention both Shakespeare and cinema. You won’t find a journal article that only mentions Shakespeare, or one that mentions only cinema.

Note that a Boolean AND search won’t necessarily find results where your search words are in the same order, or where they appear next to each other! Eg a database search for fish and chips could retrieve a journal article with the sentence “Howard Hughes ate some fish fingers for tea, passing the waiter a rack of $100 roulette chips”.  Instead, to search a database for an exact phrase, use quotation marks around your search words, ie “fish and chips”.

By searching your database for Shakespeare or cinema, you’ll retrieve journal articles that mention only Shakespeare or cinema, as well as those that mention both Shakespeare and cinema. The OR search can easily swamp you with too many search results – it’s best employed if you’re looking for an obscure topic and need to broaden your search.

By searching your database for Shakespeare not cinema, you’ll retrieve journal articles that mention Shakespeare – but nothing that mentions cinema, even if it also mentions Shakespeare.

Why does all this matter? Well… the Boolean AND is particularly crucial because databases work in very different ways. Some databases, like Google, will automatically run a Boolean AND search if you enter several search words, even if you don’t actually type AND. (If you do type AND between your search words, the worst that will happen is that you get exactly the same number of search results).

Other databases, like the library catalogue, assume that you only want to be shown results where your search words appear in the exact order (or close proximity) that you typed them in – unless you type AND between them. Effectively they’re putting quotation marks round your search words, and searching for them as a phrase. If you’re searching this type of database, failure to type AND between your search words could mean you get 50% fewer search results, without even realizing it.

To sum up…

• Use “” quotation marks to search databases for an exact phrase.
• Type AND between your search words if you’re searching for information about 2 or more different concepts and their effect on each other, eg Marxism and teaching.

 Next time around… achieving better grades with Charles Babbage’s difference engine.

Refworks and single sign-on

Athens access to Refworks will shortly be removed, allowing users to log-in with a Bath Spa username/password.

However when you log-in to the service with your new username and password for the first time, your references will not be migrated across. To make sure this happens, you will have to do it manually:

Single sign-on developments

There is now institutional access for almost all of our electronic resources at Bath Spa.

We would like to encourage all students and staff to assist us in testing access, which so far has been very successful. The feedback has been excellent, and we hope to move over to single sign-on in the very near future.

The following resources can be accessed using a Bath Spa username/password: