New books in the Library: 28th September

There are not many new books in the Library this week, mainly because staff are busy with giving library orientation presentations to new students, and developing some new services, including a collection of electronic books from NetLibrary (for more about this, watch this space).

Recent new books include Geology and geochemistry of oil and gas, by G.V. Chilingar and others, which has been added to the Petroleum Engineering Library.  You can search inside this book at Amazon.

Other recent titles, added to Riccarton Library, include The senses of fish: adaptations for the reception of natural stimuli, edited by Gerhard von der Emde, Joachim Mogdans and B.G. Kapoor, and a copy of the 2nd edition of Interaction design: beyond human-computer interaction, by Helen Sharp, Yvonne Rogers and Jennifer Preece.  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

No need for silence!

Well in certain areas of the library anyway!

 

You asked us to provide more group working space in the Library as well as maintaining good spaces for silent study.

Level 4, as well as the entrance floor (Level 2), can be used for group work, with the other two floors – Levels 1 and 3 – reserved for silent study.

Let us know what you think of this new arrangement.

Michael Breaks
University Librarian

One stop shop for Statistics!

                                                                         

   

The How to Find It: Statistical Guide has been redesigned to include online statistics freely avavilable on the internet. The internet sites are grouped under the headings: United Kingdom, Scotland, Census, Datasets and International Statistics.

The second part of the guide is a subject listing of printed series held in the library at the Riccarton campus.

Other concise and detailed guides can be located on the  Finding Information on your Subject library web page.

Helen Scheu
Subject Librarian – Management & Languages

ScienceDirect eBook trial ends

 

During the Summer Vacation the Library hosted a trial of 500 eBook titles from the ScienceDirect collection. The trial period has now come to an end, and the titles are no longer available.

The selection of titles made available provided a cross section of the ScienceDirect eBooks collection. Over the three month duration of the trial a total of 3,377 individual chapters were viewed. Some of the eBook titles proved to be very popular. The most frequently accessed was Cell Biology: A Laboratory Handbook edited by Julio E. Celis (3rd ed.), which was accessed almost 250 times.  Other titles were acccessed on over a hundred occasions each, and Whisky: Technology, Production and Marketing edited by Inge Russell attracted more than a few interested browsers.

The trial has shown that there is an interest in eBooks, and that they will be used if they are made available. Of course ever more of the Library’s resources are being made available electronically, and the use of these continues to grow. We have been exploring other opportunities to make eBooks available, through NetLibrary. There will be more information on how to access this new collection in the near future.

Iain Young
Metadata Librarian  

Welcome back – what’s new in the Library?

Welcome to all returning students – we hope you enjoyed the summer vacation.

What’s New?

We have moved all the PC Caledonia PCs to a single location on Level 4; this should make it easier for you to find an available PC. Within the next few days, we will welcome UICS Help Desk staff to their new home in the Library, right next to the PC Caledonia area. Now you can get help during weekdays without having to walk to the other end of the campus or find a phone.

We’ve also made some changes to the study areas in the Library during the summer. Last year you told us in our annual survey that you wanted better provision for silent and group work, so we’ve designated different study zones and tried to re-organise the Library to make this possible.

What are these Study Zones?

Silent Study Areas – complete silence; no phones; no talking
Quiet Study Areas – for individual quiet study; no phones; no conversations
Discussion Areas – quiet discussion OK; phones set to vibrate; no loud conversations
Group Study – room designated for group work; book through the Service Desk

Where are these Study Zones?

Level 1 – Quiet Study Area throughout
Level 2 – Discussion Area; Silent Study Room accessed from stairwell
Level 3 - Quiet Study Area in main space; 2 Silent Study Rooms in corridor; 1 Group Study Room in corridor
Level 4 – Discussion Area throughout; PC Caledonia area; access to wireless network; Computing Help Desk

We hope that these new areas make it easier for you to study in an environment that suits you. We’d be pleased to get your feedback on how effective these new arrangements are – please complete our Comments Form or our Satisfaction Survey to send us your views.

Gill McDonald
Reader Services Manager

Welcome to all new students

Welcome to all students joining the University for the first time. We look forward to seeing you in the Library, and to helping you get the most from your studies here.

The Library staff are all here to help you, so feel free to ask us anything, any time.

You will be registered as a member of the Library when you go through the Registration process. You can find all about the Library on our web pages, but a better way is to come to the introductory session which has been arranged for you. You will get details of your session from your course organiser, or look at the lists posted in the Library.

We hope you enjoy your time here at Heriot-Watt.

Gill McDonald
Reader Services Manager

Finding good quality websites

Pinakes: A Subject Launchpad is a tool which can help you find good quality websites on most subjects.  Produced and maintained here at Heriot-Watt Library, Pinakes provides links to about 40 subject gateways where you can find websites that have been handpicked, and often described, by subject experts.

Why is it called ‘Pinakes’? Well, in ancient times, the Library of Alexandria was seen as a universal store of human knowledge. However, as the Library grew in size, it became increasingly difficult to locate relevant material (a bit like the Web, in this respect). The poet Callimachus solved the problem by compiling a catalogue called The Pinakes. On a smaller scale, our own Pinakes is a similar concept with respect to finding material on the Web.

Subject gateways listed in Pinakes include the TechXtra service, based at Heriot-Watt, which helps you find help you find articles, books, the best websites, the latest industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, the latest research, thesis & dissertations, teaching and learning resources, in engineering, mathematics and computing, and Intute, part of which is also based at Heriot-Watt.

Other gateways listed include the excellent Sapling gateway, for Architecture, Planning and Landscape subjects, and SciCentral, for news on science subjects.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Saving and sharing PowerPoint presentations

Here’s a very hand web utility, available for free at Slideshare.  Slideshare calls itself “the world’s largest community for sharing presentations on the web.”  Essentially, it enables you to upload PowerPoint (ppt, pps), OpenOffice (odp) and PDF presentations to a public website where they can be viewed by others.

This can be useful if you’re working on a project within a group and want to share presentation ideas, or if you’re giving a presentation at a conference, workshop or course, and want to let attendees see your slides either before or after.

Once your presentation has been uploaded, you can see statistics of the number of times it has been viewed, and you can also embed it in a blog, like I did with this recent spineless? post.  There’s also a facility for allowing uploaded presentations to be synched with audio, which I haven’t tried, but I noticed that this was discussed in the UK Web Focus blog.

At the Slideshare website you can view recent and popular presentations uploaded by others, and there’s an RSS feed for new ones.  A Slideshare FAQ is available.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

New books in the Library, 20th September

There’s a few new books to report on this week, including How to use Web 2.0 in your library, by Phil Bradley.  Web 2.0 is very much in the news nowadays, and this book was reviewed by Marion Kennedy, Subject Librarian, in a recent issue of the Internet Resources Newsletter.  Also in the general subject area of networked information is Wireless mesh networking: architectures, protocols and standards, edited by Yan Zhang, Jijun Luo and Honglin Hu.  You can search inside this book at Amazon.  Both titles are available from Riccarton Library.

Two copies of the 4th edition of Health psychology: a textbook, by Jane Ogden, have been added to Riccarton Library.  One copy is on week loan, and one on standard loan.  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

Have you reached your information overload?

     

ScienceDirect’s TOP25 - a new way of using Heriot Watt University Library’s subscription to ScienceDirect can help.

ScienceDirect’s TOP25 is a free service that allows you to quickly pinpoint the key new developments and trends in your field.  It provides lists of the most popular articles from over 2,000 scientific, technical and medical journals on ScienceDirect. 

Its a great tool to help take the stress out of research and quickly identify those hot new developments everyone is reading about.

You can also register and set-up free e-mail alerts or use RSS feeds-great ways for busy researchers to efficiently identify those “must-read” articles without spending too much time.

Elsevier’s ScienceDirect is used by about 10 million people, which means you can be sure that the TOP25 is an authoritative, one-stop method of finding out what your peers and colleagues are reading. 

Try it today. Visit the website and you’ll see why nearly 70,000 people rely on the TOP25.

 

Marion Kennedy
Subject Librarian