Google workshop cancelled – 25th Nov

Unfortunately, due to illness, we’ve had to cancel the following workshop planned for today – 25th November.

“Google – I’m feeling lucky!”
12.15-13.15
Anderson Room, Riccarton Library

You can view the slides for the workshop or contact the presenter  for more information on what’s covered.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Marion Kennedy
Subject Librarian

New books on ethical fashion, the Scottish legal system, Greek mythology…

Added to the library recently were a number of new books – for the full list, go to the New Books section of the Library Catalogue.

     

Selected titles added to the Edinburgh campus library at Riccarton include a copy of Eco chic: the savvy shopper’s guide to ethical fashion, by Matilda Lee, which is on 3 hour loan, and a copy of the 4th edition of The Scottish legal system, by Robin M. White and Ian D. Willock

Added to the Scottish Borders College Campus Library at Galashiels was a copy of Greek mythology, by John Pinsent.

Information on how to place a reservation for a print book is available. Information on suggesting books/eBooks 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
@libram

Donation of actuarial maths books

The Library has received a donation of over 50 textbooks for Actuarial Maths courses.

The donation was made in memory of Alison Kelly, who was a student in Actuarial Maths from 2006 – 2009. We are very grateful to Alison’s family for their generous donation.

Gill McDonald
Acting Librarian

Congratulations to our new graduates!

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

We’d particularly like to congratulate our new PhD graduates. The world will soon see the fruits of your research, when your thesis is made available in our Research Output Service. This contains details of every Heriot-Watt PhD thesis, plus the full text of electronic copies of PhD theses submitted since January 2009, and a few older theses – currently about 100 full-text theses and growing almost daily.

Check out the Research Output Service to see the wide range of PhD research undertaken at Heriot-Watt.

Gill McDonald
Acting Librarian

Workshop: Finding the best of the Web

Staff from Intute  will be running a session called Diamonds in the Rust on Thursday 26th November (12.15-13.15 in the Anderson Room, top floor of the Riccarton Library).  This session will cover -

• how to locate good web resources for education and research
• demonstrate tools that develop critical thinking skills
• show some of the best online educational resources

The Internet is often the first point of call for any kind of information.  If finding the right information is proving difficult, time-consuming and frustrating, this workshop can help.

Diamonds in the Rust
Anderson Room, Riccarton Library top floor
12-15-13.15

Informal session. No need to book – just come along.  Bring your own lunch. We’ll provide the tea and coffee.

Marion Kennedy
Subject Librarian
 

 

 

Search current issues of 4,500+ technology journals through new service – TechJournalContents

TechJournalContents is a brand new service which lets you to search across the current issues of more than 4,500 scholarly technology journals from multiple publishers, in order to find the latest research articles.

Access to the full text of search results in TechJournalContents will depend on whether the Library subscribes to the journals in question or whether they are freely available through Open Access.  For off-campus access, members of Heriot-Watt University should use the Virtual Private Network to get the full text of subscribed journals. 

If you know about RSS, you can save the results of searches made in TechJournalContents as feeds, and then keep up-to-date with new content via a feedreader of your choice such as Google Reader or Bloglines.

The core behind the service is the journalTOCs API, produced by the journalTOCs Project, which is based at the ICBL, Heriot-Watt University, and is being managed by Santy Chumbe. A project blog is available.

TechJournalContents is made available by TechXtra, a free service produced by the ICBL and Library at Heriot-Watt University.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Google Workshop

Why not come along to the Library’s next lunchtime workshop on how to make the most of Google for your academic work? Called “Google – I’m Feeling Lucky!”, it covers searching Google effectively and introduces the following topics:

• advanced search techniques
• Google book search
• Google Scholar
• evaluation techniques

This workshops will be a presentation-style session with lots of opportunities for questions.

Venue: Anderson Room, Riccarton Library, top floor
Time: 12.15-13.15
Date: Wed 25th November

No need to book – just come along. Bring your lunch along. We’ll provide the tea and coffee.

Marion Kennedy
Subject Librarian

The latest new books added to the Library – 16 November 2009

Added to the library recently were books on nutrition, the science of shopping, the skills of helping, person-centred counselling, and several other topics.

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

    

Selected titles added to the Edinburgh campus library at Riccarton include more copies of Nutrition: science and applications, by Lori A. Smolin and Mary B. Grosvenor, and Why we buy: the science of shopping, by Paco Underhill.

 

Added to the Scottish Borders College Campus Library at Galashiels were copies of the 9th edition of The skilled helper: a problem-management and opportunity-development approach to helping, by Gerard Egan.

Information on how to place a reservation for a print book is available. Information on suggesting books/eBooks 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
@libram

New search engine for scholarly papers – Microsoft Academic Search

Microsoft Academic Search beta is a rather interesting new testbed search engine for over 3,000,000 scholarly papers.  Read what ResourceShelf wrote in their review of it, and read about some of its limitations, as described by Karen Blakeman - “It only seems to cover computing and the Internet”.

Find most relevant and top ranked papers by keywords:

Get an aggregated page for a certain paper:

See top ranked paper in a conference/journal:

See all the papers related to a certain author:

Plus, there are features such as the visual explorer, which lets you view links between authors, etc.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian
@libram

Times Higher Education article “Learning to share”

There’s a very interesting article in THE today, entitled Learning to share, about open access.  “Open access is, simply, the idea that research articles should be freely, immediately and permanently available online to anyone, rather than locked away in subscription journals as many currently are.” 

Both sides to various arguments about OA are discussed in this article.  Well worth a read, and of interest to anyone who publishes the results of scholarly research.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian
@libram