Library Projects

The Library is involved in a number of externally-funded information-related projects, and in some future posts to this blog I hope to give more details, and also explain how these projects can help members of the university.

In the meantime, it was nice to hear that £200k funding has been awarded for a new project we’ll be working on, along with the ICBL in MACS and Liverpool University, called ticTOC.  This funding is part of JISC’s capital programme, and ticTOC is one of 80 projects, totalling more than £15m, which have been successful in the latest funding round. 

A press release is available from JISC which gives more details of the e-learning, repositories and preservation, e-infrastructure, users and innovation, and e-research projects which have been funded.  ticTOC will be part of the users and innovation strand, and a few details are available here.

The aim of ticTOC will be to incorporate existing technology plus Web 2.0 concepts in the smart aggregation, recombination, synthesization, output and reuse of standardised journal Table of Contents (TOC) RSS feeds from numerous journal publishers.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

New e-journal titles added to the Library

13 new e-journal titles have been added to the Library this week.

They are included with the nearly 5000 e-journals available through the Library catalogue. Within the catalogue, links are provided to the full-text e-journals. Our aim is to make as many of our subscriptions as possible available electronically.

These new IET e-journal titles are accessible through the Library subscription to IEEE Xplore, the full text access technical literature service in electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics. Searching within these, and all other available titles, is possible through IEEE Xplore.

• IET Circuits, Devices & Systems
• IET Communications
• IET Computers & Digital Techniques
• IET Control Theory & Applications
• IET Electric Power Applications
• IET Generation, Transmission &Distribution
• IET Microwaves, Antennas & Propogation
• IET Nanobiotechnology
• IET Optoelectronics
• IET Radar, Sonar & Navigation
• IET Science, Measurement and Technology
• IET Software
• IET Systems Biology

A simple search box on the Library home page lets you search for all journals, or for books in one or all of the Library’s branches. If you need help accessing the electronic journals, or in identifying useful articles within them, contact our Enquiry Service at any time.

Iain Young
Metadata Librarian

New books in the Library this week

7 new books have been added to the Library this week.

These include another copy of the popular 5th edition of Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 by Bill Burke and Richard Monson-Haefel, which has been added, as a week loan, to the Riccarton Library.

Also added to Riccarton Library are Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis, and Understanding and implementing the finite element method,  by Mark S. Gockenbach.

For the full list of new books, go to the New Books section of the Catalogue.

Information on how to place a reservation for a book is available.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

New articles from the School of the Built Evironment

In a previous post, I listed ten recent articles by Heriot-Watt University authors as found in the CSA Illumina Technology Section.  Prior to that in another post I listed ten recent articles by Heriot-Watt authors as found in the Web of Science service.

This time, I’m using ScienceDirect to generate a similar list of recent articles, from members of the School of the Built Environment at Heriot-Watt.  One thing this exercise shows is that to do a complete searches of this kind (or indeed on any topic), you may need to use different database services.

1.	Full-scale measurements of convective coefficient on external surface of a low-rise building in sheltered conditions  • ARTICLE Building and Environment, Volume 42, Issue 7, July 2007, Pages 2718-2736 Y. Liu and D.J. Harris

2.	Siphonic roof drainage systems—priming focused design  • ARTICLE Building and Environment, Volume 42, Issue 6, June 2007, Pages 2421-2431 S. Arthur and G.B. Wright

3.	Surfactant effects on air pressure transients in building drainage, waste and ventilation (DWV) systems  • ARTICLE Building and Environment, Volume 42, Issue 5, May 2007, Pages 1989-1993 D.P. Campbell

4.	Effective heart disease prevention: Lessons from a qualitative study of user perspectives in Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani communities  • ARTICLE Public Health, Volume 121, Issue 3, March 2007, Pages 177-186 G. Netto, L. McCloughan and A. Bhatnagar

5.	Solar chimney and building ventilation  • ARTICLE Applied Energy, Volume 84, Issue 2, February 2007, Pages 135-146 D.J. Harris and N. Helwig

6.	The effects of surfactant dosed water on solid transport in above ground near horizontal drainage systems  • ARTICLE Building and Environment, Volume 42, Issue 2, February 2007, Pages 707-716 M. Gormley and D.P. Campbell

7.	Rheology and conduction calorimetry of cement modified with calcined paper sludge  • ARTICLE Cement and Concrete Research, Volume 37, Issue 2, February 2007, Pages 184-190 P. Banfill and Moisés Frias

8.	The relationship between human capital and time performance in project management: A path analysis  • ARTICLE International Journal of Project Management, Volume 25, Issue 1, January 2007, Pages 77-89 A.W. Brown, J.D. Adams and A.A. Amjad

9.	Simulating the sheltering effects of windbreaks in urban outdoor open space  • ARTICLE Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 14 December 2006,  Wei Li, Fan Wang and Simon Bell

10.	Modelling sheltering effects of trees on reducing space heating in office buildings in a windy city  • ARTICLE Energy and Buildings, Volume 38, Issue 12, December 2006, Pages 1443-1454 Fan Wang

If you’d like to see a more complete listing, go to the ScienceDirect service and search within the Affiliation field.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

New Copac interface makes it easier to search the merged online catalogues of major University and National Libraries in the UK and Ireland

The Copac library catalogue, which gives access to the merged online catalogues of major University and National Libraries in the UK and Ireland, including the British Library, has a new interface.

 

There is no longer a menu to go through before searching, and various other improvements have been made.  These include the addition of an RSS feed, which allows you to ’subscribe’ to specific searches, and receive details of new records and changes to existing records that match your search.  Help with RSS is available.

 

Details of some other library catalogues, including those of major libraries in Edinburgh, plus catalogus of journal holdings, will be found on our Other libraries’ catalogues page.

 

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Internet Resources Newsletter: April issue now available

The latest issue of the Internet Resources Newsletter, Heriot-Watt Library’s own current awareness service, is now available. 

This newsletter is edited by Marion Kennedy, Catherine Ure and myself, and is full of information about new and notable websites of interest to academics, news about blogs, and news about anything else which has caught the eye of the editors.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Useful little service: Citebite

Those who read the Internet Resources Newsletter will already be aware of Citebite, which was the ‘Nice Web Site’ in the March issue.

Citebite is a useful little service which enables you to create a link that opens directly at particular selected text on a website.

For example, instead of saying: go to http://www.hw.ac.uk/library/howtobuilding.html and scroll down several pages, and you will then see a mention of the Heriot Watt Library blog, all I need to do is quote the Citebite http://pages.citebite.com/s1m4g4b3g9ioa 

Citebite could be useful when directing students to a particular section/quote of interest in a long document on a distant server.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Open Access - an update

Just to update my previous post on 11 March about Open Access, the Publishing Research Consortium has released a summary paper, Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or competition? which is a condensed version of the earlier, November 2006 analysis.  This paper concludes that mandating self-archiving of papers within six months or less of publication will undermine the subscription-based peer review journal system.

Also released recently is the Research and the Scholarly Communications Process: Towards strategic Goals for Public Policy, A Statement of Principles.  As reported in Library + Information Update, according to RIN Director Michael Jubb, this ‘represents a significant step forward in articulating a shared understanding of the core goals of the scholarly communications process’. 

The Statement has been signed by has been signed by the following organisations:

• The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)
• The British Library
• The Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles (CURL)
• The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers
• The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
• The Publishers Association
• Research Councils UK (RCUK)
• The Research Information Network (RIN)
• The Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL), and
• The Wellcome Trust.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian 

New books in the Library this week

46 new books were added to the Library this week.

These include a copy of the 2nd edition of Evolution, edited by Mark Ridley, which has been added to the Riccarton Library.  You can search inside this book at Amazon.  

Also added to Riccarton Library is All the mathematics you missed: but need to know for graduate school, by Thomas A. Garrity.   You can search inside this book at Amazon.

 

New titles added to the Martindale Library, Scottish Borders Campus, include Photoshop CS: down and dirty tricks, by Scott Kelby,  and The Photoshop CS2 book for digital photographers, also by Scott Kelby.

For the full list of new books, go to the New Books section of the Catalogue.

Information on how to place a reservation for a book is available.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Edinburgh Libraries Passport launched 16 March

Heriot-Watt library is delighted to be one of the founder libraries of a new access scheme - the Edinburgh Libraries Passport. The Passport was launched today by the Lord Provost, Lesley Hinds, at a ceremony in McDonald Road Library.

In this scheme - the first of its kind in Scotland - 20 libraries across the city have agreed to offer access to their collections to members of all the co-operating libraries. There are currently 9 academic and 9 specialist libraries in the scheme, as well as the National Library of Scotland and Edinburgh City Libraries.

Heriot-Watt is already a member of access schemes which allow our members to visit other academic libraries, but this new scheme means that our members can now visit even more libraries in the city without any formalities. It is easy to join - simply complete a short form at the Service Desk and our staff will issue you with a card which you can use in any member library for a year.

The Passport scheme only allows access for reference, not for borrowing. The Passport is one of several co-operative ventures undertaken by ELISA - the Edinburgh Libraries & Information Services Agency. More information about the Passport, including details of all current member libraries is available at the ELISA website.

We also have lots of other information about access to other libraries for our members.

Gill McDonald
Reader Services Manager