Self-issue stations: we need your feedback!

So it's soon going to be two semesters that we have implemented our new self issuing stations in Aungier Street Library and before we do the same in Dame Street Library, we need your feedback on this service!

Do you like it? Do you love it? ... Do you hate it?
Whatever you have to say about this service, it's your chance to let us know!

So fill in this online survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CNDP679 and you could also win a €100 HMV voucher!

Writing for Exams

I'm pleased to say that our colleagues in the School of Arts are holding a couple of workshops on writing for exams.

Workshops will take place:
Wednesday 7th of April 5-6 AS3.4
Tuesday 13th of April 5-6 AS3.4
I've no idea what will be covered, but I think it might have something to do with exam technique. For more details, contact Orna Farrell

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations

Similar to the DART-Europe E-theses Portal, mentioned the other week is the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, an international organization "dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic analogues to the traditional paper-based theses and dissertations". In other words, full-text theses and dissertations. Online. For you to search. Have fun!

A3 printing

A3 printing is now available in Aungier Street and Dame Street Libraries.

In Aungier Street Library, use the printer beside the entrance door (one drawer is always loaded with A3 paper) for the other printers in the photocopy room in Aungier Street and in Dame Street Library, just ask for paper at the desk.

To select the A3 paper size you just need to click on print settings or print properties and change the default paper size 'A4' to 'A3'.

Library Class cancellation

Due to staff non-availability, there will be no library class on March 25th.

Exam time!

This is a good cop/bad cop posting (though you may think there's not much good cop content.)

1. To ensure fair and equitable access to Library materials in the run up to exams; from 22nd March 2010 , fines on standard loan and 7-day loan items will increase to €1.20 per day while fines on short loan materials will increase to €3.00 per day. To avoid incurring fines, Library books can be renewed online, at self-issuing stations or by telephoning the relevant library site (contact details are below). Please note that overdue items may not be renewed where a library account has a fine balance exceeding €5.00
I want to, and I think I need to, stress that we do this to attempt to ensure fair and equitable access to library books during the time when there's most demand for them. If you, as a student, are looking for a specific textbook for exam revision, but cannot find it because someone is keeping them past the due date, how would you feel? Doubling fines is an attempt to motivate people to return books on time when they most need to be returned on time. All monies garnered by library fines are reinvested in the library: your 60 cent fine for a book brought back one day late will contribute to purchasing the latest edition of your core textbooks or a new DVD that you will be borrowing one day. It's not like we spend the money on fine wine and expensive chocolates (despite my many requests). If this was an exercise in profiteering, don't you think we'd double the fines for late returns of DVDs?

Here's a article from a library academic journal discussing fines (you can access the link directly on campus). While he mentions the arguments for abolishing fines, I agree, partly, with the author when he says:

it seems to me that they serve a vital function for any library that requires efficient and equitable circulation of stock. It cannot be right that an essentially selfish act on the part of one user or a group of users deprives other users of access to that material.

2. To give you lots of notice: exam results will not be issued to students until all borrowed materials have been returned to the Library and outstanding fines cleared. Outstanding fines can be paid by cash or credit card at any library site. Payment must be received no later than one week prior to the release of exam results. If payment is received after this date then your results will not be issued for a period of up to 24 hours after the release date of results. This period is required to allow the examinations office time to update the relevant files.

3. During the period Monday 22^nd March until Saturday 15^th May, the 3 Libraries will be opened 11.00-17.00 on the following dates:

- Sunday 28^th March 2010

- Friday 2^nd April 2010 (good Friday)

- Sunday 4^th April 2010 (Easter Sunday)

- Monday 5^th April 2010 (Easter Monday)

- Sunday 11^th April 2010

- Sunday 18^th April 2010

- Sunday 25^th April 2010

- Sunday 2^nd May 2010

- Monday 3^rd May 2010 (May bank holiday)

- Sunday 9^th May 2010

So basically, we'll be open 7 days a week from 28/03 to 15/05

WARC Access revisited

I'm glad I don't work for WARC. It would seem that they received a lot of feedback from academic institutions (I sent some feedback myself) concerning their switch to personalised logins earlier this week. In response to the feedback, the use of personalised logins for users at academic institutions that prefer other access methods, like us, has been discontinued. Access to WARC is now back to normal, hooray. You don't need to create a personalised login to access WARC, unless you really want to that is. Well done to WARC for being so flexible and responsive.

WARC access

You can ignore this post, unless you really want to create a personal login, full details above.

WARC have changed the way that users access their site. Personalised logins are now the way forward - there's an element of mea culpa here as we knew they were bringing them in, but what we didn't know, was that personalised logins are mandatory. The good people of WARC say there are a number of advantages to users:

• logins will will be easier to remember
• If you have cookies enabled, you can log in without entering any details (once you have registered)
• You can create profiles and folders accessible from any PC
• Personalised logins will enable users to customise delivery of content (when changes are made to WARC later in the year)

To register click the WARC link on 'Search All Resources' (which is a secret, so I can't put the link here), and follow the on-screen instructions. Check your profile and confirm your preferences (and your agreement with the terms and conditions of usage). You will be sent an email with a security PIN, which you will need to complete the registration process. Here's a registration guide. As of now, WARC can only be searched on a stand-alone basis, that is, it can't be searched by 'Search All Resources' or EBSCOHost Integrated Search, and we await further news about this.

Library Catalogue / 'Search All Resources'

You may have noticed since we (again) upgraded to the latest version of the library catalogue, the occasional issue with access - not enough licences to use the catalogue, or the catalogue being unavailable at times. We scheduled a catalogue reset once a day every day, but this is not sufficient to ensure 24 hour access. Subsequently we have identified the source of the problem, and it seems to be 'Search All Resources'. As a consequence, we've taken the library catalogue out of 'Search All Resources'. We'll put in a link to a relevant page on the library website, but for now, no more searching the library catalogue on 'Search All Resources'

Library closure - St. Patrick's Day

As in previous years, all DBS librariers will be closed on St. Patrick's Day, giving you more time to celebrate the feast day of Ireland's patron saint.

Library Ireland Week 2010

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
— Groucho MARX (1890-1977)

Digital library project... access millions of resources for free!
Pandora Archive
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/
Access anything Australian: Pandora Archive is an online project that collects and provides access to online publications and websites that are about Australia; by an Australian author; on a subject of social, political, cultural, religious, scientific or economic significance and relevance to Australia; or by an Australian author of recognised authority and make a contribution to international knowledge.
This project started in 1996 and is a collaboration between the National Library of Australia and nine other Australian libraries and cultural collecting organisations.

Libraries around the world
New York Public Library
http://www.nypl.org
The New York Public Library serves some 16 million users who come through its doors annually.
Built carefully by generations of curators over the past 160 years, the research collections of The New York Public Library now number more than 44 million items! The Library’s website, http://www.nypl.org receives 28 million visits annually from more than 200 countries. Users can enjoy the free resources created by the Library, such as blogs, original videos, and podcasts. You can also browse print publications, interact with digital exhibitions, and browse open access journal databases... so just log on to: http://www.nypl.org and ‘discover, connect, get inspired’!


The National Library of South Africa
http://www.nlsa.ac.za/NLSA
The National Library of South Africa's collections contain a wealth of information, and include rare manuscripts, books published in South Africa, periodicals, government publications, official foreign publications, maps, technical reports, and newspapers. Many of these are available in digital format and accessible online at the library’s website http://www.nlsa.ac.za/NLSA. User can also search the open access databases provided on the website.
The Library also encompasses ‘The Centre for the Book’, whose mission is to promote a South African culture of reading, writing and publishing in all local languages, and easy access to books for all South Africans.

Emerald - change to search parameters

As previously mentioned, searches on Emerald can bring up a lot of results for which no full-text is available. This can be overcome by going into the advanced search options and choosing only to search subscribed content. However, we've decided to change administrative settings so that by default only subscribed content is searched. If you want to search all of Emerald, you can do so by going to the advanced search option and choosing to search all Emerald content. Changing the set-up so that you only see results for which full-text access is available should make your life (and ours!) a little easier.

Library Ireland Week 2010

Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves,
or we know where we can find information upon it.
— Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

Digital library project... access millions of resources for free!
Arts and Humanities Data Service
http://ahds.ac.uk/
AHDS is a UK based project that collects, preserves and promotes the electronic resources in the arts and humanities (history, archaeology, literature, language and linguistics, performing arts, visual arts).
You can access resources such as electronic texts, databases, images, and mixed media resources. It also provides you with information about similar resources which are located and managed elsewhere.


Libraries around the world (by A. Finegan)
Thursday 11th March 2010

The British Library (London)
http://www.bl.uk
The British Library (BL) is the national library of the United Kingdom. The library is one of the world's largest research libraries, holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats. There is a huge number of free online resources available, such as over two million pages from British newspapers, e-books, digitised manuscripts and rare books, audio recordings and interviews, and a classical music collection. Readers can examine every page of rare historic works, compare different editions side-by-side, choose standard or magnified view and read supporting material created by the library’s curators and other experts. Digitised works currently available include original copies of the works of Shakespeare and Chaucer, the Gutenberg Bible and the Magna Carta.
For more, check the British Library’s Online Gallery at: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/index.html


The Royal Library of San Lorenzo de El Escorial (Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial) (Madrid)
http://www.sanlorenzoescorial.com/monasterio/biblioteca.htm
The library at the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial lies northwest of Madrid. Its construction was begun in 1563, on the orders of Felipe II, to commemorate the Spanish victory over the French at St. Quentin in 1557. In 1984, UNESCO declared the monastery a Monument of Worldwide Interest.
Apart from its great beauty, the library of the Escorial is also renowned for the size and quality of its collection of codices and incunabula. The library has an extremely rich collection, which includes Arab and Hebrew manuscripts, and the personal library of King Felipe II, with some treasures such as Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa María, the Book of Hours of the Catholic monarchs, Santa Teresa’s manuscripts and diary, the gold-scrolled Aureus Codex (1039), and an 11th century Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beato de Liébana.

Database Trial - Financial Times Historical Archive 1888 - 2006

For the month of March, the Library has trial access to the Financial Times Historical Archive, 1888-2006 for the month of March.

This online facsimile edition of the FT is fully-searchable and offers the complete run of the London edition of the paper, from its first issue to the end of 2006. You can access this database either from college, home or work via username and password. To obtain login details go to 'Search All Resources' or contact the library


NOTE: Trial ends 1st April 2010.

Library Ireland Week 2010

Knowledge is free at the library. Just bring your own container.

— Unknown

Digital library project... access millions of resources for free!


Gallica
http://gallica.bnf.fr/?lang=en
Gallica is the French digital Library developped by the French National Library (Bibliotheque Nationale de France) gives you access to millions of various resources - images, text, sound recordings - from the National Library collection.


Libraries around the world
Wednesday 10th March 2010

NIGERIA: The National Virtual Library Project
http://www.nigerianvirtuallibrary.com/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx
The National Virtual Library Project is an online digital library hosted and managed by the National Universities Commission of Nigeria. It was designed and deployed with support and funding from the Education Trust Fund, UNESCO and the Japanese government and its goal is to ensure that users have access to the latest publications of highest quality in their respective fields to facilitate teaching, research and learning.
The National Virtual Library Project covers access to resources in the fields of arts, medical sciences, pure science, social sciences, technology, education, agriculture. You can also keep up to date with national events by accessing Nigerian newspapers through the projects homepage at http://www.nigerianvirtuallibrary.com/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx.


The National Library of Pakistan
http://www.nlp.gov.pk/
The collection of the National Library includes 40,100 Pakistani publications received under the provisions of the Copyright Law. Special collections include rare handwritten manuscripts in Persian language relating to history of Kashmir and first copy of Kulyat-e-Meer published in 1811 and microfilms/microfiches of all India Census Reports for 1911, 1921, 1931 and 1941.
The Library has also acquired copies of about 30 Ph.D. dissertations written in American Universities on Pakistan.

Library Ireland Week 2010

A democratic society depends upon an informed and educated citizenry.
— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Digital library project... access millions of resources for free!

The World Digital Library
http://www.wdl.org/en/
Yesterday we presented you with Europeana, the European platform giving you access to millions of digitised items from all over the world, today, let’s travel again in cyberspace with the World Digital Library, a similar project to Europeana, but developped in the US by the Library of Congress and supported by UNESCO.
The World Digital Library started in 2006 and its missions are to promote international and intercultural understanding, expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet, provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences, and finally help narrowing the digital divide within and between countries.
With the World digital Library,
The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.
The principal objectives of the WDL are to:
• Promote international and intercultural understanding;
• Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
• Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
• Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.


Libraries around the world (by A. Finegan)
Tuesday 9th March 2010:

The National Archives and National Library of Bangladesh, (Dhaka)
http://www.nanl.gov.bd/
The Bangladeshi National Library and Archives comprises almost all of the country’s publications and has a large collection of foreign publications, especially on Asian countries and more specific related to South Asian Studies.
The National Library and Archives of Bangladesh has collected a considerable number of proceedings volumes from the Bangladesh Secretariat Record Room dating from 1859 to 1964, which mainly contain letters, orders, resolutions, rules, reports etc. of the Government of the East India Company and Government of Bengal. There are also a vast number of valuable historical records, which have been collected from the Dhaka Divisional Commissioner’s Office. These records cover the period from 1898 to 1971 and deal with the events occurred in the rural Bangladesh.
Visit the online gallery to browse contents from the National Library and Archives – you can zoom in to examine documents in greater detail http://www.nanl.gov.bd/

The National Library of Ireland (Dublin)
http://www.nli.ie
The National Library of Ireland’s holdings constitute the most comprehensive collection of Irish documentary material in the world and offer an invaluable representation of Ireland’s history and heritage. The Department of Manuscripts has approximately one million items in its collections spanning nearly a thousand years, and many of these can be accessed online through the Library website, http://www.nli.ie.
And did you know that the Library hosts a wide variety of events including public lectures, poetry and music recitals, theatre, children's storytelling, creative workshops, and much more. Award-winning exhibitions can be visited at the library for free in person or online.
So log on to http://www.nli.ie and visit the Library on Kildare Street in Dublin city centre and the National Photographic Archives in Temple Bar

Library Ireland Week 2010

"Libraries are not made; they grow."

Augustine Birrell (1850-1933)

Digital library project... access millions of resources for free!
Europeana: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/

Europeana is a multilingual project sponsored by the European Commission and the European Members States that allows you to access more than 6 million digital items: from images, to texts, to sounds and recordings from European and worldwide museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections.
… a great way of getting lost in virtual space and discover resources that make your mind wonder and travel!

Libraries of the world (by A. Finegan)
Monday 8th March 2010:

The National Library of India (Kolkata)
http://www.nationallibrary.gov.in/
The National Library of India in Kolkata has collections in all the Indian languages as well as foreign language books published on India. The Library also collects, processes and preserves Chinese and other East Asian languages; at present the collection has 15,000 Chinese and one thousands each in Japanese, Korean, Tibetan, Nepali and Thai languages. There also a large number of Arabic, Persian and African books and manuscripts.

The National Library of China
http://www.nlc.gov.cn/old/old/english.htm
The National Library of China in Beijing has a rich collection of over 24,1100,000 volumes/items, and ranks 5th among the libraries of the world. In the collection there are 270,000 volumes of rare books, 1,600,000 volumes of general ancient books, 35,000 pieces of the scripted turtle shells and animal bones.
The Library not only has the largest collection of Chinese books in the world, but also the biggest collection of materials in foreign languages in the country. In the main collections of the Rare Book Department, there are 270,000 volumes of ancient rare books, including 1,600 volumes of the Song and Yuan dynasties, most of which are the only existing copies or rare copies. Besides, there are 12,000 volumes of new rare books, manuscripts of notable authors, and 25,000 volumes of rare books in foreign languages, 268,000 items of rubbings, which are worldwide famous for its number, quality and variety.

The National Library of Sweden
http://www.kb.se/english/

The National Library of Sweden in Stockholm has been collecting everything printed in Sweden or in Swedish since 1661. The Department of Audiovisual Material (previously the Swedish National Archive of Recorded Sound and Moving Images) collects TV and radio programs, movies and videos distributed in Sweden, Swedish music and multimedia recordings.
The National Library is also a humanities research library that purchases scholarly literature in several languages.
The National Library coordinates services and programs for all research libraries in Sweden and administers and develops LIBRIS, the national library catalogue system.

Library Newsletter

The latest edition of the library newsletter can be read below

DART-Europe E-theses Portal

DART-Europe is a partnership of research libraries and library consortia who are working together to improve global access to European research theses. The DART-Europe partners help to provide researchers with a single European Portal for the discovery of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), and they participate in advocacy to influence future European e-theses developments. DART-Europe offers partners a European networking forum on ETD issues, and may provide the opportunity to submit collaborative funding applications to achieve DART-Europe's vision for ETDs.
The above is all taken from the DART-Europe website (and still counts as plagiarism as I have not otherwise made it clear that those are not my own words). In simpler language, the E-Thesis portal is a searchable database of full-text dissertations and theses held by some European Universities that are available online. There may be a bias towards scientific topics, but feel free to have a look.

Oyez! Oyez!

Library Ireland Week 2010 will be launched next Monday and during the whole week, DBS Library will offer you to go on a world tour of famous libraries, we will also give you the opportunity of discovering more on what DBS Library has to offer to you by giving you access to selections of resources in the Library in Aungier Street, and we will unveil the 7 wonders of DBS library...
So watch this space, come in to the Library, join and celebrate!

Search All Resources working again

See, that didn't take too long (I hope!). Access to EBSCO databases on 'Search All Resources' has been restored, apart from LISTA fulltext and SocIndex, which we're still working on.

Resultless Search All Resources

There's an issue that's arisen with 'Search All Resources'. Somewhere in the guts of WebFeat (the software behind 'Search All Resources'), some settings pertaining to how WebFeat and EBSCO databases talk to each other seem to have been reset. This means that when searching EBSCO databases, no results will be returned. In WebFeat, click the EBSCO database link to go and search individual databases, and you have no problems retrieving results (unless you search for something like "three legged hamsters"). Other, non-EBSCO databases work fine. To summarise: searching EBSCO Databases in 'Search All Resources' won't work, so search the individual databases instead, ok? We'll let you know when normal service is resumed. If you like searching multiple databases at once, then don't forget the forthcoming EBSCOHost Integrated Search (login with your student number and date of birth).

Finding full-text articles on the web

When I was a student, way back in the middle ages, there was no such thing as the World Wide Web. Consequently there were no online electronic resources, full-text or otherwise. If I wanted to look for something, I had to use a printed index (a publication named Biological Abstracts) which was updated if I recall correctly, on a monthly basis. If I found something interesting that I wanted to read, I had to a request an Inter-Library Loan. In this brave new world, there's a myriad of electronic resources online, a lot of which offer full-text of articles at the click of a link. We subscribe to some electronic resources, quite a few from EBSCO for example. However there's no guarantee that EBSCO, or any other DBS library-subscribed resource will have the full-text of an article that you want to read. This long preamble serves to introduce a long posting on other places on the web to look for, and find, full-text articles.

Linked to on the library website and in the A to Z is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). I'll explain the name i.e. define "open access journal" another time, but basically this is a directory of scholarly journals that meet quality standards (via peer-review or editorial quality control) and are freely available for all to read at the time of publication. At the time of writing, there are 4790 journals in the directory, 1896 journals are searchable at article level and 358974 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

OpenJ-Gate is similar to DOAJ, but is larger although criteria for inclusion are not so clear. In addition to open access journals, OPenJ-Gate also includes professional and trade publications. OpenJ-Gate originates from India, so there's a chance that more content from the developing world will be included.

I don't know how different the Open Access Journals Search Engine is from either of the above; it's not as if there's thousands of open access journals for each site to ignore. This is a search engine rather than a directory, rather like...

...Jurn, an academic search engine that searches free open access ejournals in the arts and humanities, along with other arts and scholarly journals offering free content and "free sample book chapters" offered by scholarly publishers. Here's a list of indexed titles.

Highwire is an epublishing platform that offers free access to the full-text of nearly 2,000,000 articles. Unfortunately most of these are from science journals, rather than business or the humanities, thus perhaps limiting interest to psychology and addiction students.

These are all good places to look for full-text that can't be found in our subscribed electronic resources. There are of course, other places you can look, such as pre-print archives, faculty webpages and institutional repositories. A pre-print, as the name suggests is a draft version of an article that is yet to be printed. Many publishers and individual journals all ow for some form of self-archiving, be it pre-print or post-print. Academics often show off their articles on their personal pages on university and college websites - search for the article title and look for results from personal webpages - while most research institutions have created repositories of publications produced by their staff. That's a lost of content, some of which will be full-text, potentially available if you know how to where to look...

...and of course there are a few good sites that can assist you in your quest:

OAIster started off as a University of Michigan project to create a collection of freely available, difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable. A partnership with Online Computer Library Center, Inc (OCLC) has followed that ensures continued access to open-archive collections. Note however that OAIster includes non-academic and non-open access material.

OpenDOAR is a directory of academic open-access repositories - you can either search for repositories, or search repository contents.

University of Maryland Open Archives, E-print, and Preprint Archives is exactly what is says on the tin, and is nice if you have the time to spare, otherwise search OAISTER or OPenDOAR.

If all else fails, there's always Inter-Library Loan, nicely bringing us back to the start of the post.