New books in the Library, 27 July

 

New books added to the Library this week include a copy of Contemporary Spanish politics, by Jose M. Magone.  Copies of the 11th edition of Organizational behavior, by Fred Luthans, and a copy of the 6th edition of Fluid mechanics, by Frank M. White, were also added.  These books are available in Riccarton Library.

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

RSS – eh?

In the sidebar to the right of this blog is a box saying “Subscribe to this blog’s feed” and then a link to Help with RSS which in turn gives information about some RSS feeds provided by Heriot-Watt.

What is this thing called ‘RSS’?  Well, that’s actually a fairly long story, and there are various websites where you can get more information, such as the Wikipedia page on RSS, or this YouTube video, or this brief slide presentation, or this slide presentation from the University of Michigan libraries, or this explanation from the BBC.

If you want to know more about some ways RSS is being used for the benefit of academics, you may be interested in a recent article I wrote entitled RSS Update: It’s RSS, Jim, but not as we know it.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Updated Databases and Other Electronic Resources list

Dave Bond, the Information Systems Librarian, has updated the Library’s Databases and Other Electronic Resources list.  This is a list of bibliographic databases, ejournal services, reference services, gateways, search engines and more, each of which has been selected by the Subject Librarians as a useful source of information.

Students, staff and researchers should find this list useful for finding relevant services to search and explore for literature reviews, finding material for projects and dissertations, and answering reference questions.

Over 300 services are included in the list, which ranges from the ACM Digital Library, to Zetoc. More information is available, on the list page, about many of these services.

More detailed advice on finding information on subjects can be found in the How To Find Out guides, produced by the Subject Librarians.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

A personal view

If you look at the information box to the right and just below the header of this spineless? blog, you’ll see that the intention is to provide news, views, information and advice, etc.

Most of the past posts have provided news, information and advice, rather than views.  However, this is not to say that the people who write for this blog don’t have their own views.

Just in case you’re interested, I invite you over to a ‘guru interview’ I did for Emerald LibraryLink a few weeks ago, which includes some views on various aspects of project work, repositories, the role of subject librarians and marketing of information services. 

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

New service for finding scientific information – WorldWideScience.org

I mentioned various services for finding scientific information in a previous post.  A new addition is WorldWideScience.org, which was launched at the end of last month.

WorldWideScience.org is a joint effort from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the British Library, along with eight other participating countries.  According to the website, it “…gives citizens, researchers and anyone interested in science the capability to search science portals not easily accessible through popular search technology such as that deployed by Google, Yahoo! and many other commercial search engines.”

WorldWideScience provides a single entry point to several national and international scientific databases.  More national and international science databases have been invited to join the venture and make their collections accessible, so we can expect the list to grow in the future.

Results from searches are returned in relevance-ranked order, and many (but not all) of the references retrieved are freely available.

Databases searched include:

Article@INIST (France)

Australian Antarctic Data Centre (Australia)
Canadian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (Canada)
Defence Research and Development Canada (Canada)
DEFF Global E Prints (Denmark)
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Electronic Table of Contents (ETOC) (UK)
J-EAST (Japan)
J-STAGE (japan)
J-STORE (Japan)
Journal@rchive (JAPAN)
NARCIS (Netherlands)
Science.gov (USA)
Scientific Electronic Library Online (Brazil)
UK PubMed Central (UK)
Vascoda (Germany) 

For more databases available to members of Heriot-Watt University, see our Databases and other electronic resources list.

 

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

New books in the Library, 19th July

 

A number of new books have been added to the Library this week, including Economics, by N. Gregory Mankiw and Mark P. Taylor, and International handbook on economic regulation, edited by Michael Crew and David Parker.  Both books are on standard loan at Riccarton Library.

Books added to the Galashiels Library included a copy of Fashion buying, by Helen Goworek.  You can search inside this book at Amazon.

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

Digimap subscription renewal continues access to Ordnance Survey Data Collection

The Library has renewed the subscription to Digimap for a further two years, to 2009. 

Digimap Ordnance Survey Data Collection provides Ordnance Survey data for the whole of the UK.  It includes details from the National Topographic Database, including housing; commercial, industrial, community and public buildings; communications (roads, railways,airports, transmission lines); and distinctive names.  You can search by placename or postcode.  The service allows you to generate maps online, or to download data for use with appropriate application software such as GIS or CAD.

For more details, and information on registering with Digimap, see the database information page.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Reminder – Riccarton Library closed 16 – 19 July

Riccarton Library will be closed for stocktaking from Monday 16 – Thursday 19 July.

You can use all the electronic journals and databases as normal while we’re closed.

We will re-open on Friday 20 July, and will be open throughout the summer vacation.

Gill McDonald
Reader Services Manager

Congratulations to all our graduates!

Congratulations to all students who are graduating this week. We hope you enjoy the ceremony – and the strawberries!

We’d particularly like to congratulate Helen Waugh who graduates with a PhD in Maths this week. Many of you will recognise Helen, who worked in the Library as a member of the evening Service Desk team throughout her PhD research. Well done, Dr. Waugh!

Gill McDonald
Reader Services Manager

What are the most influential journals in your subject area?

The 2006 data for Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is now available.  Using JCR you can find out a journal’s impact and influence in the global research community. 

This is particularly useful for authors to help them identify:

• which journal to publish in.
• the status of the journal in which they have published.
• journals useful for research. 

 You can access the Journal Citation Reports from the list of databases on the Library website.  If you would like assistance in accessing or using JCR, please contact your subject librarian .

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