Library Newsletter - November December edition

Click here for the latest edition of the Library Newsletter. 

 In this edition of the newsletter:

• Lists of new titles available in the library from 1st October until 1st December this year.
• Marie O'Neill explores the research funds available to early researchers in all disciplines through the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST).
• DBS US Exchange Student Konark Patel gives us his impressions of his visit to Northern Ireland earlier this semester.
  
• Alex Kouker outlines how the Assignment Planner can help students manage their academic workloads more effectively. 
• Marie O'Dwyer looks at the most borrowed books by student in DBS.
• Trevor Haugh picks an interesting case in EU Law available through our database Westlaw IE and explains how the "Missing Items Unit" works.
• Of more specific interest to librarians and students on the MSc in Information & Library Management might be the details of the annual conference next February 2015 of the A&SL group of the Library Association of Ireland.
• And the usual regular pieces to entertain and inform...

And with this newsletter we bid a fond farewell to Amye Quigley,, our newsletter editor for the past 3 years, who moves on to pastures new and more lucrative (but I bet not half as much fun).
All the best Amye - see you in the funny papers!

Obligatory Christmas Opening Hours Post

Christmas is coming, so of course we are closing over the holiday period.  The college is closed that time, so it's not possible for the library to stay open over Christmas, sorry.

Also, too we have some now traditional Sunday opening hours coming up as we enter the exam period too.

First, Sunday opening

Sunday 14th December   11.00-17.00
Sunday 21st December   11.00-17.00
Sunday 4th January         11.00-17.00

Christmas opening

Aungier St is now open every day until Tuesday 23rd December, when we close at 1pm and re-open on Sunday 4th January.


Dame St will close on Monday 22nd December and re-open on Sunday 4th January

In addition to these dates, Aungier St library will close at 17.00 on Friday 19th December (Dame St will be open to 9pm as usual) and Dame St library will be closed Saturday 20th December (Aungier St library will be open as normal on this day).

Gosh! That was a bit complicated!  Our opening hours can be found on the Library website, so check there.

One other thing to note, is that closed days do not count towards overdue books and library fines.  If you have a book due back on 23rd December, but instead return it on January 5th, your fine will be a whopping ...60 cents, ok? So don't panic about rushing into town on the 23rd.  In any case, you should be using your online library account to manage your loans.

Finally, library staff wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Image - Wicklow Street: "Happy Christmas" – A Christmas greeting in Irish. (2006) ( PabloBarcelona at en.wikipedia)    

New trial: EBSCO e-book business collection

For the next month, well, until 5th December, we are trialling EBSCO's eBook Business Collection.  This collection includes over 12,000 e-books on subjects such as marketing, finance, supply chain management and entrepreneurship and also focusing on career growth, personal development, communication and networking.

Here's a title list  eBook Business Collection Title List

This direct link seems to work else content will appear via the search box on the main library page.  

Bank Holiday Closure - Monday 27th October

As usual, we are closed the October Bank Holiday Monday.  Don't take my word for it though, here's a nice poster saying the same.

Normal service will resume on Tuesday

Want to win a £100 Amazon voucher?

Technically speaking the title should be "Want a chance to win a £100 Amazon voucher?"  If you do read on...

Emerald Insight - which is a fine resource in its own right - want you to take a “selfie” in the library which they you then post on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram using the phrase “#EmeraldInsight into [your study subject here]”.   Here's a helpful Vine on the topic.  Vines, selfies and hashtags! Where will it end?

Even if you don't want to post a selfie, do consider using Emerald, especially if you're a business or library student.  No login required on-campus.  Off-campus use your Athens account for access.

 

DBS Assignment Planner

I think the image is self-explanatory.  You can use the assignment planner to help manage and organise your forthcoming assignments.  We strongly recommend that you have a look.  Moodle login required.  

Kindles for loan!

On top of all the other changes we made during the summer,  we’re now branching out into lending Kindle e-Book Readers.

There will be five Kindles storing Arts based material and the rest will contain Business, Law and IT related e-books. The Kindles will be loaded with core and supplementary texts from your reading lists. 

They will come with a cover, charging cable and portable envelope.  The Kindles will be available to borrow for one week periods at the Aungier Street and Dame Street Library desks, making their lending period similar to other items currently in the library collection. 

Some of the attractions of the device include access to material which is in high demand and the ability to borrow multiple books at once (no more heavy bags!)  Both students and staff will be able to borrow the items.  We expect demand to be high so take one out early not to be disappointed. 

Check your reading list online

Apart from Athens (see previous post), the other big change this year is the introduction of LORLS.  What is LORLS? I metaphorically hear you ask.  Let me tell you; LORLS is an online repository of module reading lists.  What;'s the point of that?  I think will be the second question. Let me answer that too.   Online reading list software makes reading lists more manageable, and if they're more manageable, then they're easier to use and you can do more with them - for example, you can see availability of reading list items in the library, you can directly link to electronic versions of the texts (i.e ebook versions) or to journal articles.

In LORLS, we've arranged the modules hierarchically starting with course type

so if you're doing a Master's, click on Masters; if you're doing a diploma, click on Diploma.

Under course type, is the name of the course, so find your course, click on that and you should see all of the modules on your course.

Click on the module and the reading list should appear.  Simples!

We're still populating LORLS, so if you don't see a list, check again later.  If the list doesn't appear in the next couple of weeks, contact the library.

LORLS can be accessed directly on campus (link to follow) or through Moodle.



       

  



 

Simplifying library logins

We're making a few changes to how you access library resources, and trying to cut down on the number of library logins that you have to remember.

Ok, let's review things as they stand.

Your library account - where you can view & renew items on loan and reserve items that other people have on loan, you access with your student number and date of birth

The search box on the library homepage also uses your student number and date of birth.

Access to all other library resources off-campus is through an Athens account.

In the near future

You will access your library account with the same login as you use for Moodle and for college PCs

The search box on the library website will require an Athens account. 

If you don't have access to Athens already, you should receive details of your account in the next few weeks.  This will be sent by email, to the same address that we have on record for you.

We'll keep you posted.

 

Search our library catalogue from your Android phone (I)

Smartphones are becoming ubiquitous in daily life.  While the majority of smart phone use is for leisure rather than work or study, it makes sense for us library folk to let you know, now and again, ways in which you can use your smartphone in a library context: thus this post.

If you have an Android phone, you can search our catalogue merely by scanning a book's barcode.  How cool is that?  "Not very" I'm sure is the response.   Anyway what you need to do is:

1. Download & install Barcode Scanner from Google Play (it's free)
2. Open the App & go to Settings.
3. Scroll down to "Custom search URL" and enter http://koha.dbs.ie/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?idx=nb&q=%s
4. Ok and exit.
5. Scan the ISBN code of a book. When the ISBN is recognised, touch Custom search, which will open the catalogue record of the book (if it's in the catalogue)

I don't have an iPhone, so I can't say for sure if you can replicate this on that device. 
Browscan - Barcode Scanner (again, it's free) has a custom URL setting, so perhaps you can try that on an iPhone and let us know.  

Access to Mintel

For reason too complicated and too boring to expand upon, Mintel is no longer available through Athens.  Instead you can access Mintel by logging into Moodle and clicking the link in the Library Resources box on the top right of the home page.  Happy Mintelling!

Bank Holiday Weekend Opening Times

Below are the opening times for the August Bank Holiday weekend.

Aungier Street Library

Saturday 2nd 9.30am to 5.00pm

Sunday 3rd Closed

Monday 4th Closed

Aungier Street Building

Saturday 2nd , Sunday 3rd  & Monday 4th  - 8:00am to 6:00pm

Dame Street Library

Saturday 2nd 9.30am to 2.00pm

Sunday 3rd Closed

Monday 4th Closed

Dame Street Building

Saturday 2nd - 9:00am to 2:30pm

Sunday 3rd Closed

Monday 4th Closed

 Castle House

Saturday 2nd, Sunday 3rd  8:00am to 6:00pm (Closed B/H Monday 4th)

Balfe Street & Bow Lane

Closed

Dawsonera down

The Dawsonera website is currently unavailable.  This is due to unforseen technical issues (are technical issues ever forseen I wonder?)  Unfortunately Dawsonera are unable to provide a time scale for when the service will resume, so I'm guessing it's rather serious.  But be assured they are working hard to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

**Update 20/06/2014**

Dawsonera anticipate that their full service will continue to be unavailable throughout the weekend.

DBS Library Annual Seminar

And now for something completely different...

We held what hopefully will be the first in a series of annual seminars on Friday 13th June (which is why we closed the library for that day).  We felt that it was a great success and it did seem to be well received.  Library staff (including your humble scribe) were among the speakers and if you want an idea of what we work on behind the scenes, you can find the presentations from the day here  

AS Library Saturday closures

It seems unfortunate that the most recent postings here all relate to closing a library for a while, but at least it's summer and most of you are occupied elsewhere. Anyway, Aungier St library will be closed on the following three Saturdays in July  

Saturday 12th July 
Saturday 19th July 
Saturday 26th July

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Please note that Dame Street Library will be open until 5pm on these Saturdays

Aungier Street Library Closure - Friday 13th June

The Aungier St library will be closed on Friday 13th June to facilitate library-type stuff. Dame St library will remain open and Aungier will be open as normal on Saturday

A further short note about Passport

Not through Athens this time, or rather not just through Athens.  I shall quote our Passport contact

Passport is built on Windows platform and we do not support any form of Apple products. Users may be able to access Passport but intermittently, but a lot of the functionality will not work and we can’t guarantee a good service because we don’t support it.
We support Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Firefox, but it works best on Internet Explorer.
If you use Google chrome on a Mac, you should be able to access Passport, but we can’t guarantee all the functionality. As we don’t support any Apple products, we cannot do any testing to replicate [any issues that may arise during of Apple products to access Passport]

So there you are. If you use Passport, best to do it on a PC.

Passport access through Athens

There is an intermittent problem (the worst kind of problem) with access to Passport GMID through Athens.

The issue not unique to DBS and is beyond the control of Euromonitor  in that the problem does not originate with them; it is related to an upgrade in software from Eduserv/Athens.  They are working to find a solution. 

The following options are thought to be useful in overcoming access problems.

• If you close the browser and open the page again – you may have success in getting into Passport.
• Refreshing the browser may help.