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

Library Cafe

There will be a cafe on the entrance floor (Level 2) of the Library from September serving the same range of drinks and snacks that you can buy at Cafe Brio.  We have called it Dewey’s after the classification scheme that the Library uses to arrange its books on the shelves, so do drop in for a 641.8157 (the number for muffins) next session. September will be month of special promotions.

Michael Breaks

University Librarian

Online access to OECD publications

The library now has a subscription to SourceOECD Economics

SourceOECD Economics includes online access (from January 1998 ) to all OECD books, periodicals, and databases related to national accounts and general economics. 

It includes the

• OECD Economic Outlook and its database, the OECD Economic Surveys
• Main Economic Indicators and its database
• Annual and Quarterly National Accounts and their databases
• Central Government Debt
• the OECD Factbook
• OECD Economic Studies
• Economic Policy Reforms
• OECD Journal of Business Cycle Measurement and Analysis

You can access these publications at SourceOECD Economics (access from off campus is via the VPN ) and the titles will be added to the Library catalogue soon.

Catherine Ure
Subject Librarian

New service for teaching staff- digital copies of library material for Vision courses

The Library can provide you with digital copies of Library material (book chapters, journal articles and other library material) to create online resource lists for students in Vision, making core texts more accessible to students from on and off campus.

This service (in conjunction with existing subscriptions to electronic resources) will allow you to create online resource lists in Vision, linking to the full text of library materials.

The digital copies are made available under the CLA photocopying and scanning licence and the library is using the British Library’s Higher Education Scanning Service (HESS) to provide the digital copies. For more information on the service consult Digital copies of library material for Vision courses.  During the pilot the Library will meet the cost of the digital copies.

There are obvious advantages to providing digital copies of book chapters, articles and other learning materials in Vision courses, particularly for students who study part-time or by distance learning.   For all students,  providing a digital copy of a core text in Vison, will lead to less of this

when they discover the item they need is out on loan!

Catherine Ure
Subject Librarian

Final week for eBook survey

The national survey on eBook use, which the Library is participating in, closes at midnight on Friday 15 February.

Please do take a few minutes to complete the survey this week as a high response rate will make it much more useful. The survey is open to any member of the university, be they an undergraduate, a professor or support staff. To date there have been 17,745 responses to the user survey from staff and students from universities all around the country.

By participating in the survey you will be given the opportunity to enter a prize draw, with the chance to win £200 in Amazon vouchers. To complete the survey Click here

You can access the titles made available through the Library’s participation in the  JISC E-Books Observatory Project, and find out more about the Library holdings, at the Library eBooks page. 

Iain Young
Resources Manager

Riccarton Library closed Sunday 3 February - emergency repairs

Riccarton Library will be closed on Sunday 3 February for emergency repairs.

We apologise for any inconvenience while this essential work is carried out.

Gill McDonald
Reader Services Manager

e-Journals milestone reached

A significant milestone has been reached in the Library provision of electronic resources. Lynn Burns, who is responsible for keeping the e-journals database updated, today added the 5,000^th title (and the 5,001^st, 5,002^nd and 5,003^rd).

All of these subscribed e-Journal titles are available to University students and staff from both on and off campus. A full title list of the e-Journals available can be viewed online, or individual titles can be searched for in the Library OPAC.

This number is likely to continue increasing as the Library continues to support electronic access to the most relevant available resources.

Iain Young
Resources Manager

Around the blogs

Here are a few things found via other blogs which should be of interest to members of Heriot-Watt University.

1. Via the Englibrary blog, I noticed news about Bentham Publishers, who are launching more than 200 peer-reviewed Open Access journals. The list of journals by subject shows a number of titles relevant to subjects taught at Heriot-Watt, including The Open Civil Engineering Journal, The Open Construction & Building Technology Journal, and The Open Chemical Engineering Journal, to name but three. Content is already available in some cases. Open Access means that all articles are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.

2. Science Library Pad, a blog written by Richard Akerman, reviews the new free 2collab service from Elsevier which is currently in the news. Akerman writes, “A strength of 2collab is the ability to create an manage groups”.

2collab is a social bookmarking site where you can store and organize your favorite internet resources – such as blogs, websites, research articles, and more. Then, in private or public groups you can decide to share your bookmarks with others – stimulating debate and discussion. Members of groups can evaluate these resources (by rating bookmarks, tagging and adding comments), or add their own bookmarks. You can browse public groups and bookmarks, but must register (your name and email address) to access the full functionality – such as creating groups, adding comments, and adding bookmarks.

3. Via the Update blog from the University of Worcester, I noted the Creative Review blog, from the writers of Creative Review, which is a print journal held at the Scottish Borders Campus Library (more details here).

4. Finally, I noticed a story about Scitopia, mentioned previously in a June spineless? post, in a news item from the Information World Review.  Scitopia is a federated search gateway to more than three million science and technology documents, and has been officially launched. Scitopia can be used to find publications from 15 societies, such as the Acoustical Society of America, American Society of Civil Engineers, SPIE, etc.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Reminder - one week to return your Standard Loans

Undergraduates, Masters & Diploma students

All Standard Loan books which you have borrowed this term are due for return by Friday 23 November.

If you wish to keep them for longer, you can renew them at any time before the deadline by logging on to your Library record (via Patron functions) in the catalogue. Simply select the books you want to renew, and then click on the “Renew Items” button. Remember - you cannot renew a book if someone else has reserved it, if you have any overdue books, or if you have more than £2.00 outstanding in unpaid fines.

All Standard Loan books borrowed or renewed now are due for return in the first week of next term - by Friday 11 January 2008.

If you need help renewing your books, or of you have any questions about borrowing, contact the Service Desks in the Riccarton or Galashiels Libraries.

Gill McDonald
Reader Services Manager