New books in the Library - 31 July

Added to the library recently were books on innovation management, market research, numerical earth models and several other topics.

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

 

Added to Riccarton Library were two more copies of the 4th edition of Innovation management and new product development, by Paul Trott.  You can search inside this book at Amazon.

Added to the library at Galashiels was a copy of Market research in practice: a guide to the basics, by Paul Hague, Nick Hague & Carol-Ann Morgan.  You can search inside this book  at Amazon.

Added to the Petroleum Engineering Library were two titles, Numerical earth models, by J.-L. Mallet, and Arabian plate sequence stratigraphy, by Peter R. Sharland and others

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

Information on suggesting books for the library is also available, or you can let the Subject Librarians know if you have any suggestions for new titles.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

ScienceDirect: Facts, features and new services

A training session on ScienceDirect was held last Thursday in the Library, delivered by Chris James and Rogier Van Erkel from Elsevier.  Those attending included teaching staff, research students and library staff from Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh, Napier and Queen Margaret Universities.

If you haven’t used ScienceDirect before, ScienceDirect is a collection of over 2000 full text journals published by Elsevier.  The Library subscription gives access to the full text from 1995 onwards of over 1000 journals, and bibliographic details and abstracts are available for articles published before 1995.  ScienceDirect is available from the list of databases on the Library website.

The session began with some general facts about ScienceDirect:

• Approximately 1000 english language research articles were published globally in 2006, 25% of these were published by Elsevier journals.
• 11 million researchers worldwide have access to ScienceDirect.
• At peak hours almost 5000 researchers are online simultaneously.
• 36 full text downloads every second during an average working day.
• In 2007 over 385 million full text articles were downloaded in total.

Some useful features of ScienceDirect were demonstrated, logging into ScienceDirect allows you to personalise your homepage and set up quick links to your favourite journals, articles and websites.  You can also view your previous actions such as your recent searches and downloads.

Logging in also allows you to set up search alerts, which will notify you by email when new articles meet your search criteria.  You can also create:

• Topic alerts
• Volume/issue alerts
• Citation alerts

These alerts are also available as RSS feeds which you can view using your feedreader (more information on RSS feeds is available from Keeping up to date on the Library website).

Another feature demonstrated was the top 25 hottest articles, these are the top articles currently being downloaded by other ScienceDirect users, you can also view the top 25 in specific subject areas.

A new service which was launched in 2007 is 2collab.  This service is freely available to all and is a collaboration platform designed specifically for researchers in the science, technical and medical communities.

2collab provides three types of features:

• Online bookmarking and reference management
• Groups- for sharing with existing networks, or building new ones
• Networking- find, evaluate and initiate contact with new people

 

If you want to find out more of the different features of ScienceDirect, check out the online guides and tutorials 

Catherine Ure
Subject Librarian

Is the web narrowing scientists’ expertise?

There’s an interesting article in the Economist.com, dated July 17th, entitled Great minds think (too much) alike.  There’s no point repeating any of it here, but if you have an interest in changes to patterns in the number of times articles are cited, or the effect of back issues of journals becoming available online on citation patterns, then I can recommend it.

Heriot-Watt subscribes to The Economist, and print copies are available in the libraries at Riccarton and Galashiels.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

New books in the Library - 23 July

Added to the Library recently were books on topics including innovation management and new product development and environmental technology for the oil industry.

For the full list of new books go to the New Books section of the catalogue and choose the last 1, 2, 3 or 4 weeks.

Selected new books in the Riccarton Library include (a) Researching and writing a dissertation: a guidebook for business students by Colin Fisher (see contents online), and (b) Mentoring manager: strategies for fostering talent and spreading knowledge by Gareth Lewis (see contents online).

Information on how to place a reservation for a book is available from the Library website, and you can also suggest books for the Library.

Arnold Myers
Senior Information Scientist

New books in the Library - 17th July

Added to the Library recently were books ranging from working time regulations to the collected papers of Albert Einstein.

For the full list of new books go to the New Books section of the catalogue and choose the last 1, 2, 3 or 4 weeks.

Selected new books in the Riccarton Library include Winning investment habits of Warren Buffett and George Soros: what you can learn from the world’s richest investors by Mark Tier;The limits to travel : how far will you go? by David Metz; and Sustainable design: the science of sustainability and green engineering by Daniel Vallero and Chris Brasier.

Information on how to place a reservation for a book is available from the Library website, and you can also suggest books for the Library.

Arnold Myers
Senior Information Scientist

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 Hamza Khan and Vas Ramanujam, who both worked as Student Shelvers in the Library, and who graduate in Actuarial Maths & Statistics this week. Well done!

Gill McDonald
Reader Services Manager

Improvements to the Library catalogue

Some of the keen eyed amongst may have spotted the book cover images now displaying in the Library catalogue.

This is a trial run of a product we are looking into at the moment to add content to our cataloge records. Only covers for books from certain publishers will be displayed, so you may notice more in some subject areas than in others. We will also be looking at adding tables of contents and summaries to the catalogue to provide even more information to users searching for relevant titles

While we look at ways to make the catalogue more user friendly and improve the content within it, we are also looking into the possibility of linking through from the catalogue to Google Books, which some of you may be familiar with already, and will evaluate how this enhances the catalogue

If you have any comments on how useful the addition of book covers, and other information, to the catalogue might be I’d be happy to hear them so please leave a comment.

Iain Young
Resources Manager