New books in the Library, 30th August

 

New books added to the Library recently include Wireless communications and networking, by Vijay K. Garg, and Buildings for tomorrow: architecture that changed our world, by Paul Cattermole.  Both titles are available from 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

Royal Society of Chemistry - site downtime

 

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) website will be unavailable from 8am on Saturday 1 September until 4pm on Sunday 2 September 2007 for an essential upgrade. This means that there will be no access to RSC’s online products and services during this period. Normal access to full-text RSC journals  (incorporating the RSC journal archive 1841-1996) will resume after this temporary downtime.

Marion Kennedy
Subject Librarian

New & notable websites, interesting new blogs, news items

You can find details in the September issue of the Internet Resources Newsletter, Heriot-Watt Library’s own monthly current awareness service .

This free newsletter is edited by Marion Kennedy, Catherine Ure and myself.  An RSS feed is available for the Table of Contents, and/or you can subscribe to the email version by filling out the form on the newsletter homepage.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Outside the library

When you feel you need a change from being inside the library,  why not swap your book or computer screen for greener things? All these photos were taken in the campus or in the surrounding countryside . . .

   

   

We’ve not had the best weather for enjoying the great outdoors this summer - but all the more reason to get out there when you can.  After all, getting close to nature seems to do us good.

 

Marion Kennedy
Subject Librarian

Newly published books - Chemistry and Life Sciences

 

In addition to regular Spinelsss? posts on new books available in the library you can now get regular information on newly published books in Chemistry and Life Sciences .   Staff and students at Heriot Watt can recommend any of these newly published titles to be added to the library’s collection - using our online form (with completed forms forwarded to your School’s Library Representative).

The information on the newly published titles comes from Dawson - the library’s book supplier.   The information received from Dawson  is used to create webpages - giving bibliographic details, ISBNs, prices, cover images and short summaries -  which are made available in the How to Find Out Guides for Chemistry and Life Sciences .  

The title lists are not exhaustive but they do cover a range of different publishers and the lists are updated monthly. Have a look at some sample entries . . . . .

038768350X Hardback £71.50
Carey, Francis A.,
Advanced organic chemistry
Springer, 5th ed.

 

 

Since its original appearance in 1977, Advanced Organic Chemistry has

maintained its place as the premier textbook in the field, offering

broad coverage of the structure, reactivity and synthesis of organic

compounds. As in the earlier editions, the text contains extensive

references to both the primary and review literature and provides

examples of data and reactions that illustrate and document the

generalizations. While the text assumes completion of an introductory

course in organic chemistry, it reviews the fundamental concepts for

each topic that is discussed. The two-part fifth edition has been

substantially revised and reorganized for greater clarity. Among the

changes: Updated material reflecting advances in the field since 2001’s

 Fourth Edition, especially in computational chemistry; A companion

Web site provides digital models for study of structure, reaction

and selectivity; Solutions to the exercises provided to instructors

 

013203882X Paperback £46.99
Audesirk, Teresa.
Biology - life on earth with physiology
Prentice Hall, 8th ed. [International ed.].

 

 

Known for its thorough coverage of diversity, animal physiology,

ecology, and environmental issues, this comprehensive book engages

students in asking and answering questions during the course. Biology:

Life on Earth helps instructors and students manage a wealth of

scientific information in a manner that is both meaningful and

long-lasting for students. The authors encourage students to learn

according to their own style, and to relate this information to their

own lives. In each chapter, the Eighth Edition of this trusted biology

resource features significant content revisions as well as new figures

and photographs.

 

0521535638              Paperback               £21.99
Martin, Paul
Measuring Behaviour
Cambridge University Press          3 ed.   

    

                      

Measuring Behaviour has established itself as a standard text. Largely 

rewritten, updated and reorganised, this third edition is, as before, a

guide to the principles and methods of quantitative studies of         

behaviour, with an emphasis on techniques of observation, recording and

analysis. It provides the basic knowledge needed to measure behaviour, 

doing so in a succinct and easily understood form. The sections on     

research design and the interpretation and presentation of data have   

been greatly expanded. Written with brevity and clarity, Measuring     

Behaviour is, above all, a practical guide book. Aimed primarily at    

undergraduate and graduate students in biology and psychology who are  

about to embark upon quantitative studies of animal and human behaviour,

this book provides a concise review of methodology that will be of great

value to scientists of all disciplines in which behaviour is measured,

including biological anthropology, the social sciences and medicine.

Keep an eye on the blog for updates on newly published items.

Marion Kennedy
Subject Librarian

New books in the Library, 24th August

 

New books added to the Library recently include Ports, cities, and global supply chains, edited by James Wang and others, and Service management and marketing: customer management in service competition, 3rd edition, by Christian Gronroos.  You can search inside this book at Amazon.  Both titles are available from Riccarton Library.

Also added to Riccarton Library was a copy of Governing sustainable cities, by Bob Evans and others.

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

Library projects: ticTOCs - a plan to transform scholarly journal current awareness

In previous posts I’ve mentioned some projects in which the Library is involved, including PerX (which completed in June) and TechXtra, which is an ongoing freely available service for those looking for information in technology.

I reported back in March that a new project, called ticTOCs, in which the ICBL and Library are involved, had been funded by JISC.

ticTOCs is a project to develop a freely available service which we hope will transform journal current awareness by making it easy for academics, researchers and anyone else to find and use journal tables of contents (TOCs) from multiple publishers from within a personalisable web based environment.

Fifteen partners are involved in the project, giving it a strong base for development. Lead by the University of Liverpool Library, the consortium also includes Heriot-Watt University, Cranfield University, CrossRef, ProQuest, RefWorks, Emerald, Nature Publishing Group, SAGE Publishers, Institute of Physics, Inderscience Publishers, MIMAS, Directory of Open Access Journals, Open J-Gate and Intute.

Efficient journal current awareness services are of the highest importance to researchers and academics, whatever their discipline. Ensuring efficient and easy access to the contents of the latest journal publications is also important for publishers of scholarly journals, a business which is estimated to be worth $5 billion per annum. Authors of articles in scholarly publications also want their output to be available to as wide an audience as possible, as soon after publication as possible. The service which is being developed by ticTOCs will benefit all of these sectors - academics and researchers, publishers and authors, and also service providers such as libraries.

The ticTOCS service will enable academics, researchers and anyone else, without having to understand the technical or procedural concepts involved in the process, to discover, subscribe to, search within, be alerted to, aggregate, export and re-use standardised Table of Contents RSS (really Simple Syndication) feeds and their content for thousands of journals from numerous publishers. In addition, it will facilitate the re-use of aggregated journal TOC content on a subject basis by gateways, subject-based resource discovery services, library services and others, where it can act as a showcase of the latest research output. It will also make it easy for users of library and information services, commercial and open access journal publishers, online gateways, content aggregators and journal directories to subscribe to journal TOC RSS feeds of interest, with one click, via a freely available personalisable web-based interface. 

A prototype service is expected to be up and running by April 2008.

The project has been named ticTOCs because part of the service will involve the ticking of selected TOCs of interest, from an easy to use online directory of thousands of feeds.

A website gives more information about the project, and there’s also a ticTOCs News Blog.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Who is this man and what has he to do with the library?

This is Melvil Dewey (1851-1931) Librarian, father of the Dewey Decimal classification (DDC) system, founder of the Adirondack Music Festival and fan of English language spelling reform.

The Dewey Decimal classification (first publishd in 1876) is the most widely used classification system in the world and has been translated into 30 languages including Icelandic, Norweigan and Korean.  It is based on the idea that all knowledge can be divided into 10 main subjects or classes - each class having a further 10 divisions and each division having a further 10 sections. Find out more with the full list of Dewey Decimal classes.  Using this system, books on the same subject are shelved together in the library.

The main classes are: -

000 – Computer science, information, and general works

100 – Philosophy and psychology

200 – Religion

300 – Social sciences

400 – Language

500 – Science

600 – Technology

700 – Arts and recreation

800 – Literature

900 – History and geography

In the library we classify and organise our books using the DDC and give each a spine label with the DDC number.  This spine label matches the class number in the catalogue. Books are shelved numerically by the DDC number. So, all the science books are shelved at 500 (one of the 10 main classes).   All the social science books are shelved at 300  and so on. Within the 500s Chemistry is shelved at the 540s (one of the 100 divisions) and Organic Chemistry at 547 (one of the 1000 sections).    Its all very organised and makes it easy for people to find things. So, we like to keep things in order - but not quite as vocally as this Librarian.

Things you didn’t know about the Dewey Decimal System .  . . .

There is a fictional hotel called the Hotel Denouement in Lemony Snicket’s books entitled “A Series of Unfortunate Events” where floors are named and numbered according the the Dewey Decimal system.  There is also a real hotel in Manhattan called the Library Hotel which also organises its rooms according to DDC. This hotel has rooms on 10 floors. Each foor is numbered as a Dewey Decimal class. For example, the 3rd floor is numbered 300 and has rooms stocked with books on social science subjects and the 5th floor is numbered 500 and has books on science subjects in each room.  

Now you know where Librarians go on holiday

Marion Kennedy
Subject Librarian

New books in the Library, 17th August

 

New books added to the Library recently include Research methodology: a step-by-step guide for beginners, 2nd edition, by Ranjit Kumar. You can search inside this book at Amazon.  Also added was Le Pen en Provence, by Frederic-Joel Guilledoux.  Both titles are available from Riccarton Library.

Added to the Galashiels Library was Management: an introduction, by David Boddy, and a copy of the 8th edition of Organizational behavior : managing people and organizations, by Ricky W. Griffin and Gregory Moorhead

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

Academic staff - send us your Reading Lists

As you prepare your courses for the coming year, please remember to send the Library a copy of the Reading Lists you will be giving to your students.

Why do we need your reading lists?

We need to be sure that the Library has copies of all the books you will be recommending to your students next year. We need details of all your recommended reading so that we can ensure we have copies of all the books you recommend, and that we have enough copies for the number of students in your classes.

What do we do with your lists?

We check to make sure we have all the books on your lists.

We order any books which we do not already have.

We order additional copies of books where you indicate large numbers of students in your classes.

We inform you if any of the books on your list are out of print, or otherwise unavailable, so you can consider alternative recommendations.

How are these books paid for?

We use the central Course Book Fund to buy books to support teaching. Books on your reading list will be charged to this fund, rather than your School library fund.

What should you do?

Please send your lists to Eve Dick in Riccarton Library. Please give the approximate number of students expected to take the course, so we can order multiple copies if necessary..

Please remember

We need advance warning of any books which you will recommend to your students – tell us before you tell them!

Thanks!
Gill McDonald
Reader Services Manager