New books in the Library, 29 June

 

A number of new books have been added to the Library this week, including A guide to MATLAB object-oriented programming, by Andy H. Register, and The smart study guide: psychological techniques for student success, by Louise Tamblin and Pat Ward. You can search inside The smart study guide at Amazon.  Both books are on standard loan at Riccarton Library.

Also added was a copy of the 3rd edition of Mechanical science, by W. Bolton.

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

IEEE Conference Proceedings available online

Full Text in IEEE Xplore contains a comprehensive collection of documents. Included amongst these are nearly nine thousand IEEE conference proceedings.

IEEE conference proceedings on IEEE Xplore date from 1988 onwards, with select content back to 1953. Made available as full text searchable PDF documents these are accessible through the Library subscription to IEEE Xplore, the full text access technical literature service in electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics.

These documents can now be accessed through a search on the Library catalogue. Links within the catalogue records direct you to the full-text documents. As well as these new additions the catalogue includes records for almost five thousand e-journal titles, and five hundred e-books. We continue to make as many of our subscriptions as possible available electronically.

If you need help accessing electronic resources, or in identifying useful titles within them, contact our Enquiry Service at any time.

Iain Young
Metadata Librarian

What are the core text books for your subject area?

JISC national e-books observatory project is licensing a collection of electronic books free.  They aim to make available for 2 years a collection of electronic books which are the core texts for HE taught course students in the following subject areas:

• Engineering

• Medicine

• Media Studies

• Business and Management

JISC have consulted with publishers of electronic books and have received lists of their core texts.  JISC would now like input on which are the core text books used by Heriot-Watt teaching staff to support their courses, or in JISC’s words…

“which e-books are the bread & butter for your taught course students, which e-books are likely to be most in demand so that we can license the best e-books and create a CORE COLLECTION in each subject area”.

The Library’s e-books group, Helen Scheu, Arnold Myers and myself are ranking the books in order of importance, based on the reading lists and usage statistics obtained from print copies of the textbooks available in the Library’s collection and will provide these to JISC by the deadline of 18th July 2007. 

 More information about the project, its background and aims  is available from national e-book observatory project consultation.

 If you have any comments on the JISC project or on e-books in general, please comment on this post or email Catherine Ure

Catherine Ure
Subject Librarian (Mechanical, Chemical and Civil Engineering)

Blogging highlights

This blog is now more than six months old! 

Since we first started, we’ve blogged about all sorts of things which we hope have been of interest to members of Heriot Watt University. 

There have been posts about services to which the university subscribes, such as Marion’s entry about email alerts in Science Direct, Arnold’s entry about Informaworld the new interface from Taylor & Francis, Ian’s entries on new IET e-journal titles and new Science Direct e-journals, and Catherine’s post about the ICE Virtual Library.    

We’ve shone the spotlight on some resources of interest featuring sites in planning, housing, urban regeneration and real estate management, we’ve posted about free trials (I think all of these are now closed), Helen has given details of the new Mintel platform, Gill has kept us informed, amongst other things, about when books are due for return and opening hours, and I’ve posted about Institutional Repositories, and Open Access.

Each week we’ve also tried to keep everyone updated on new books in the Library, and Catherine has entertained us by even posting about bats in the library!

Two of the most popular posts have been those on the trial of 500 e-books, and the PerX project, but there have been many others, and you can view them from the Archives link.  Overall, more than 120 posts have been written, and spineless? has had more than 8,000 visits.

We’ve certainly enjoyed blogging, and we hope you’ve found the various posts of use.  Of course, we’ll be continuing to blog over the summer, though probably a bit less frequently. 

If there’s anything you particularly want to know about, please let us know, either by emailing one of us (details are on the About this blog page), or commenting on this post.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Who said: “We need to rethink: the work, not the physical book, is the centre of the trade publishing universe.”?

You can find the answer in the latest issue of the Internet Resources Newsletter, which has just been published.

Also included in this issue are details of nearly 100 new and notable web sites, news about blogs and RSS,  a review of How to use Web 2.0 in your library - a new book by Phil Bradley, and some links for leisure time resources.

This newsletter is edited by Marion Kennedy, Catherine Ure and myself.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

VISION / CROSS-SEARCH PILOT: the results are in

The library and ICBL at Heriot Watt University recently evaluated a pilot cross-search service embedded in VISION - the University’s virtual learning environment (VLE).  You may have helped us fill in the evaluation form.

From the results, we know that most people who replied thought it would be useful to:-

• integrate library materials in the VLE
• use a cross-search services to access library and other materials
• re-use search results in VISION

View the detailed results of the evaluation to find out more or see the research paper associated with this evaluation.

Many thanks to everyone who helped with the evaluation.

 

Marion Kennedy
Subject Librarian

Enjoy the summer vacation - we’re still open!

We wish everyone an enjoyable vacation. The Library will be open on our normal vacation schedule. Each Library will be closed for a short period:

Martindale Library will be closed Monday 2 July - Friday 13 July to move to temporary accommodation in the Halls of Residence

Riccarton Library will be closed Monday 16 July - Thursday 19 July for stocktaking

We look forward to seeing you again in October.

Gill McDonald
Reader Services manager

New books in the Library, 22nd June

 

A number of new books have been added to the Library this week, including The economics of sports broadcasting, by Chris Gratton and Harry Arne Solbergm, and Decent homes for all: planning’s evolving role in housing provision, by Nick Gallent and Mark Tewdwr-Jones. Both books are on standard loan at Riccarton Library.

Also added was the 6th edition of Building surveys, by Peter Glover

Added to the Galashiels Library was New York fashion, by Sonnet Stanfill. 

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

Mintel has a new look!

Mintel is rebadging to Mintel Oxygen and has redesigned its website.

It will still contain the same content of marketing reports, but has added new features including What’s Hot (the latest industry news) and a direct link to company profiles.

The library will go across to this new platform at the end of August.
To preview Mintel Oxygen please contact me and I will provide the logon details.

Helen Scheu
Management Librarian

Graduating in July?

Congratulations to everyone graduating in July. We wish you great success in your future careers or further study.

Remember that you should return any books which you still have on loan before Graduation. You can check whether you still have any books on loan through the catalogue - select Patron Functions to check your details.

Want to keep on using the Library after you graduate? Simply register as an External Borrower and keep on borrowing!

Gill McDonald
Reader Services Manager