Extended opening hours – Easter Break

The Edinburgh Campus Library will be open during the Easter Break for the same hours as in semester, with the exception of Easter Weekend. This is the first time we have opened 7 days a week during a vacation; the extended hours are designed to give you more time to revise for your exams. We will be monitoring your use of the Library during the Easter Break to see whether sufficient use is made of the Library to continue these extended hours in future years.

Easter weekend

Good Friday and Easter Monday are University holidays – thanks to those staff who have volunteered to give up their holiday to allow the Library to open on these days.

Friday 10 April OPEN 09.00 – 21.45
Saturday 11 April CLOSED
Sunday 12 April CLOSED
Monday 13 April OPEN 09.00 – 21.45

Gill McDonald
Deputy Librarian

IMechE – free student membership and free online books!

Mechanical Engineering students get FREE IMechE membership.  All IMechE members have access to electronic library resources, including over 300 e-books in Knovel (not the entire database) and 350 e-books in Books24×7.

There are also electronic resources available only in the IMechE Library, however, you may contact the library team who will run searches on your behalf and email you the results.

Members also get the full borrowing and document supply rights (note, depending on what you wish to request, HWUL Inter Library Loan may be cheaper).

Sarah Kelly
Subject Librarian

Free student use of Faculty of Actuaries Library

Students at Heriot Watt University Department of Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics are FREE to use the Faculty Library (the Library has some books and journals which we don’t have at Heriot-Watt).  On visiting the Library, you will be asked to show your student card and this will provide access to the following:

• borrow up to 6 books for four weeks
  please advise in advance if you want to borrow – search the Library Catalogue first
• photocopies of periodical articles and extracts from books
  these can be supplied on request, subject to copyright
• support from library staff
  e.g. to search for information, statistics and hard-to-trace references
• space for private study

In addition, books and journal articles can be requested and posted out (20p per page for photocopies* and you must pay return postage for books) – request items through the website or by e-mailing the librarian.

There are also various online resources – available for free, directly through the Library Catalogue or the publications archive.

Sarah Kelly
Subject Librarian

* depending on what you wish to photocopy, Inter Library Loan may be cheaper

IChemE membership – free online books!

Chemical Engineering Students get IChemE affiliate membership for £20 (2009 rate – this is a one off fee for membership until the December following your graduation).

Those with affiliate membership have access to the Knovel database, which provides access to nearly 2,000 leading reference works and databases from over 40 international publishers and professional societies – allowing you to quickly locate relevant and reliable information. Project students may find this particularly useful.

Members also have access to the Information Portal.

For those without membership, all staff and students get free access to KEssentials, 14 free eBooks made available by Knovel.

Sarah Kelly
Subject Librarian

ACM membership – free online books!

Computer Science/Electrical Engineering Students can get ACM Student Membership for $19.00 USD per year (2009 rates). Student membership gives a variety of benefits, including:

• 500 online books powered by Books24×7
• Electronic subscription to CACM magazine
• Electronic subscription to Crossroads magazine
• ACM CareerNews (bimonthly)
• ACM e-news digest TechNews (triweekly)
• ACM’s monthly online newsletter MemberNet
• ACM Online Guide to Computing Literature
• Option to subscribe to the full ACM Digital Library
  N.B. The University already subscribes to this and you get on and off-campus access – please DO NOT pay extra for this
• More than 3,000 online course titles from SkillSoft

Sarah Kelly
Subject Librarian

Help with Maths…

Whether you are studying biosciences, management, business, accountancy, economics, engineering, statistics (…or maths!), you will no doubt need to use maths in your course. If you are struggling with this/need a refresher on some of the concepts you may not have looked at for a while, then mathcentre might be just what you need. Mathcentre provides subject specific maths help, including:

• Quick reference leaflets which provide easily accessible support on key topics.
• Teach-yourself booklets with a more in-depth treatment of important topics and which include theory, worked examples and exercises.
• Practice and revision booklets which contain hundreds of practice exercises with answers.
• On-line exercises, which allow you to self-test or practice basic techniques.
• Mathtutorvideo tutorials on a wide range of mathematical topics.
• iPod video segments, useful short clips from our Mathtutor video tutorials that you can download to your video iPod.
• 3GP mobile phone downloads, useful short clips from our Mathtutor video tutorials that you can download to your mobile phone
• Facts & Formulae Leaflets

Mathcentre is created and maintained by people who run UK university maths support centres, who teach maths, and who design new media products for learning. Support materials are delivered free of charge, to students, teachers, lecturers and everyone looking for post-16 maths help.

eCalc also have some freely available calculators and worksheets (on algebra, geometry, trig and calculus) which may be useful.

Sarah Kelly
Subject Librarian

If you must write on something…

Instead of writing on the library tables, which then need to be either scrubbed clean or replaced, both of which cost money, why not try out the Library whiteboards I’ve been testing?

Go from this:

To this

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Twitter and Heriot Watt University Library

Some people think Twitter, the free microblogging service, is wonderful, and others think it’s a bit of a waste of time. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, and it all depends on how it’s used.

Educators are using Twitter, and libraries have also begun to use it in a variety of ways, usually as a further method of communication with their users.  

If you want to tweet about Heriot Watt University Library, you can use the hashtag #hwul9

As an experiment, I’ve set up a feed for this tag at the bottom of the Comments, Complaints & Suggestions page, and I’ll be monitoring it in my Bloglines account.

Roddy MacLeod
http://twitter.com/libram

Management accounting, business law in Scotland – and other new books in the Library

Added to the library recently were books on management accounting, business law in Scotland and several other topics.

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

 

Selected titles added to the Edinburgh campus library at Riccarton include Comparative international accounting , by Christopher Nobes and Robert Parker (additional information for this title is available), and Management accounting for business, by Colin Drury

More copies of Business law in Scotland, edited by Gillian Black have been added to the library at Galashiels.

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

The exam survival guide

© Jackhynes Flickr.com

The Exam Survival Guide
Anderson Room, Library top floor
12.15-13.45
Wed 1st April OR Wed 29th April (repeat session)

The next Library lunchtime workshop entitled “The Exam Survival Guide” is all about  . . . you’ve guessed it. . . . how to prepare for exams.  Come along to this session to find out how to work smarter, not harder in the run up to exams.

The session will cover revision strategies and techniques for getting through exams including -

• deciding which questions to answer and in what order
• communicating what you have learned to the examiner
• avoid what really irritates examiners
• what to do if your mind goes blank

Run by Isabelle Pottinger,  Advisor from the Effective Learning Service, this is an informal session and tea, coffee and biscuits are provided. Bring your own lunch.

The Exam Survival Guide
Anderson Room, Library top floor
12.15-13.45
Wed 1st April OR Wed 29th April (repeat session)

Don’t fail to come along!  

Marion Kennedy
Subject Librarian