Tuesday 24 April 2012

Wikipedia and company information

I, like the majority of Internet users, use Wikipedia. Sometimes it's hard not to, as it's the one of the first results returned when you search for something. I do however take Wikipedia with a pinch of salt, usually looking at the cited sources for an article and I'd never NEVER use Wikiepdia for academic purposes (unless I was looking, again, at cited sources). The following news snippet is a good example of why you shouldn't use Wikipedia for academic purposes, and it has extra relevance as it involves company information...

 Up to 60% of Wikipedia entries about companies are incorrect, according to research published in the Public Relations Journal. It doesn't matter the provenance of those mistakes, be it just plain wrong information or attempts at sabotage, but what is more important is that the mistakes don't necessarily get fixed very quickly.  Researchers surveyed 1,284 PR people and found that of those who contacted Wikipedia about factual errors on their company entries, 40% heard back in days, 12% weeks and 24% never received any reply at all. Fair enough, Wikipedia is not a public relations tool, but you'd expect errors to be corrected quicker than that.

So the moral of the story is, if you want accurate company information, use the library's electronic resources.  We have a series of guides on finding good business information:

Case Studies: Advertising

Case Studies: Business

Company Information

Industrial Sector Information

Market Research Data

Product Information

SWOT Analysis

Look at these, not Wikipedia!  And in case you don't believe me, here's the research itself:

DiStaso, M. (2012) Measuring Public Relations Wikipedia Engagement:How Bright is the Rule? Public Relations Journal 6(2) 1-24

***** Update ******  Very interesting comment left (thanks for that Nihiltres), which critically analyses the research and suggests that it is lacking in rigour.  That doesn't mean you should use Wikipedia for academic research however.   
      

Monday 23 April 2012

Marketline

Once there was Marketline and now there is 360 Datamonitor and in the future there will be Marketline Advantage.  Marketetline are beefing up their company & country profiles and providing access to more case studies.  I counted them all* and there's 30,000 companies, 3,500 industry profiles and over 110 country profiles. You can also access all their case studies, over 50,000 financial deals reports along with over 60,000 news articles.  It took me a quite a while, as you can imagine.  The URL is http://advantage.marketline.com/ and should be available on-campus. Off-campus we'll sort out shortly.



* Just kidding.

Tuesday 17 April 2012

The Directory of Open Access Books

As the name suggests, there is a relationship with the Directory of Open Access Journals and as the name further suggests it's a directory of free full-text academic e-books, and its main purpose is to improve the visibility and discoverability of open access textbooks.  I've no idea if it's of any use to you, but it's certainly worth a look and of course new titles will be added all the time, so even if you can't find anything you want to peruse, you can try again at a later date. As I type, the directory contains links to 756 books, but that number will only increase  Go here to have a look.      

Thursday 12 April 2012

Finding e-dissertations in the library catalogue

A common query these days in library towers is "How do I find past dissertations that are available online through the library catalogue?".  In response in future, I'm going to direct students to this post.  Which means I better explain how to do this.

0) If you are on-campus and using Internet Explorer, open Firefox or Chrome before continuing.
1) Go to the online library catalogue
2) Click the enter library button
3) Click the 'Advanced' link below the main search box



  
This makes a couple of changes to the page, revealing two drop down menus.  One entitled 'Search In' and the other entitled 'Media type'.

4) In the 'Media type' drop down menu, locate "E-Dissertations" and tick the box next to it.  You'll need to scroll down to find E-Dissertations as the list is not necessarily in alphabetical order (though we'll look at fixing that if we can)



5) To retrieve all online dissertations, type * in the main search box and click the search button, otherwise enter a search topic and click the 'Search' button

6) Your search should hopefully return some results.  Click on a title to see a detailed record.

7) In the detailed record, depending upon the display there will be a line somewhere that looks like:

Other resources URL for direct access to this e-dissertation: hdl.handle.net/10788/246

or 

Associated URL for direct access to this e-dissertation: hdl.handle.net/10788/246  

You get the idea; you're looking for the phrase

"URL for direct access to this e-dissertation"

Click the URL.  This will take you to E-Source, the DBS institutional repository, showing the bibliographic data for the dissertation.  

8) Below the abstract, you will see something like

 
 
   Click on View/Open to view/open the full text of the dissertation.



Tuesday 10 April 2012

Library Website down 14th April 2012

On Saturday 14th April the library website will be unavailable due to server maintenance.  The DBS website and student intranet will be similarly afflicted, do this will be a day for hitting the textbooks or taking the day off entirely. 

The library catalogue  should still be available to search for books and manage your library account.  You can retrieve ebooks through the library catalogue.  If however the library catalogue is unavailable, click here for Dawsonera

You can still use EBSCOHost databases by clicking here and logging in with your student number and date of birth in format dd/mm/yyyy.  If you select EBSCOHost integrated search, you can search non-EBSCO  databases tooo.

I've not been informed that Moodle will be offline on Saturday, but the nature of the work being done would mean I wouldn't be surprised if it was down for the day.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause

  

Thursday 5 April 2012

Advanced/Guided Search on the Library Catalogue

This has come up a couple of times recently in the content of searching for e-dissertations (I can eke out another short post about that however), and so merits escalating to a blog post (DEFCON 3 is next).

We have had a couple of queries from user who have been unable to use the guided search or advanced search options and the drop down boxes for media or field selection have been greyed (grayed?) out.  Here's a couple of suggestions to resolve matters:

1) Change browsers. Switch to Firefox or Chrome as this problem has only cropped up with Internet Explorer.  If I may editorialise briefly, you should consider switching to Firefox or Chrome as both are better than Internet Explorer (in my humble opinion of course).  If you are on-campus, this is a better solution as the one below may not work.

2) If you really prefer to stay with Internet Explorer, then take the following steps (these instructions come from the library catalogue vendor's technical support department):

1) Click on the Tools icon (a small cog in the upper right hand corner of IE's Window).
2) Select "Internet options" from the list that comes up.
3) Now click on the "Security" tab that comes up in the new "Internet options" window.
4) Please now click on the "Custom level..." button.
5) The window "Security Settings - Internet Zone" should now be open.
6) Please scroll just about all the way down to find the "Scripting" section.
7) The "Active scripting" radio button will currently either be set to "Disable" or "Prompt" neither is desirable and will cause the issue as described. Please set it to "Enable".
8) Finally click on the "OK" button twice to bring you back to IE and try the library catalogue again    


Tuesday 3 April 2012

Easter Opening Hours

As mentioned yesterday, here's a list of DBS building opening hours for the Easter Weekend.


Aungier Street
Good Friday 6th:   8:00am to 10:00pm,  
Saturday 7th          9:00am to 6:00pm
Sunday 8th            9:00am to 6:00pm
 B/H Monday 9th  9:00am to 6:00pm

Balfe Street & Bow Lane
Friday, Saturday, Sunday & Monday Closed

Castle House
Friday, Saturday, Sunday & Monday – Closed

Dame Street
Friday, Saturday, Sunday & Monday: 9:00am to 6:00pm

See yesterday's post for library opening hours over the weekend.