Electronic Information Services Bulletin

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September 2006

Dear readers, I apologise for the non-appearance of this alerting service over the past few months - I have had some time away from the University. I hope we will now revert to a (roughly) monthly distribution.

Comments and questions to the people indicated or to your Faculty Librarian please, NOT to Sian Kennedy.

Unless otherwise stated, resources listed here are available via the Library catalogue and the website's Subject Directory.

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Free Access to Sage e-journals until 18th October

you may like to know that Sage are offering free access to their e-journal collection until 18 October. To access the journals, go to http://online.sagepub.com/  

Sage currently have an offer on their table for 2007 in relation to this journal collection. Library staff are currently evaluating this offer. If you think there is a substantial amount of coverage relevant to your research and/or teaching, you may wish to make this known to your Faculty Librarian or to Ian Mayfield, giving some idea of how high on your priority list this would be in relation to other resources.

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Farewell to Athens, welcome to Devolved Athens!

It is now no longer necessary for you or your students to have Athens accounts. Instead, when logging on to an Athens resource you simply input your University login details. For more details go to www.port.ac.uk/library/athens or contact Janet Wilmot (janet.wilmot@port.ac.uk).

Some colleagues have reported that via the new system they do not have access to saved search profiles. We are enquiring about how these could be transferred across to your new login, but in the meantime you can still log in via your Athens account, or you may wish to set up new profiles.

If you have any problems, please contact Janet or the Electronic Resources helpdesk:
www.port.ac.uk/library/ehelp

New look Library home page

We are gradually overhauling the Library's website with a view to making it easier to navigate and to provide quicker access to the most sought resources. The new look home page is now in use - see
www.port.ac.uk/library

Your views on this new entry point are invited to your Faculty Librarian or Sylvia Gannon (sylvia.gannon@port.ac.uk).

E-book news

The Ebrary electronic book collection now contains over 30,000 titles. Subscriptions to this and to NeLibrary have both been renewed for the coming academic year. Unlike Ebrary, NetLibary operates on the basis of a small core collection of around 100 titles to which individual titles can be added on request. To view available titles, go to
http://extranet.netlibrary.com/titleselect/index.asp (you will need to create a free login account). To request a purchase contact your Faculty Librarian.

We have created a list of e-book collections available to University users, including many open access collections; see
http://www.port.ac.uk/library/ebooks

SCOPUS trial due to end

Users of the SCOPUS database are reminded that this was offered free to academic libraries by the publishers, Elsevier, until the end of this year. If we wish to continue to access the database after that date we will need to pay a five?figure sum annually. Currently, it is difficult to see how we could do this without making cuts elsewhere. Your views and suggestions are sought  to Ian Mayfield, please.

New Resources

Literature Resource Center : up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on nearly 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world, supplemented by 'scholarly materials'

Women, War and Society: from the Imperial War Museum: a ground-breaking fully text-searchable mixed media archive - press-cuttings, minutes, reports, correspondence and photographs - accompanied by newly commissioned themed essays for researchers and students new to digital primary source historical documents.

Art Full Text:  this is essentially Art Abstracts with the added value that 150 journals are available in full text from 1997 to the present. A wide range of subjects are covered including all aspects of art, design and craft, architecture and interior design, costume and fashion, motion pictures, photography, television and video.

Education Media Online has changed its name to Film and Sound Online. These collections of film, video and sound material are available for download, either in full or as segments, and can be used freely in learning, teaching and research.

Endnote and ProCite

EndNote 7 and EndNote X are now networked side-by-side. Ideally new users should use EndNote X, unless they feel that they have a compelling reason to use EndNote 7. The University's EndNote site licence allows users to install a copy of EndNote X on University-owned PCs, but not on personal ones. If you have a University-owned laptop that needs EndNote installing on it please contact Mary Withers in Information Services (Ext.2273); if you want to install EndNote X on a personal PC you will need to purchase a copy from the UK vendors, Adept Scientific: http://www.adeptscience.co.uk /(01462-480055). With Athens Authentication you can purchase a copy at educational discount.

ProCite will shortly be removed from general distribution and will be delivered only to the desktops of those individuals who are using it. Information Services are logging the use of ProCite, though they may miss those individuals who activate ProCite through Word's 'Cite While You Write' function, rather than activating ProCite directly from the Start menu. If you need to have ProCite delivered to you personally please email andy.barrow@port.ac.uk.

Ian Mayfield
09/06

November 2006 

Referencing@Portsmouth

A team led by Roisin Gwyer has developed a website aimed at providing assistance to students (and staff!) experiencing difficulties with referencing or simply wanting the answer to a ‘how do I do this’ question. To view the site, go to 
www.referencing.port.ac.uk

Sage e-journal deal 

The Library has signed up to a new deal for 2007 for Sage journals. This will give e-access to 446 journals in social sciences, life sciences and humanities.

SCOPUS news

In the September bulletin I drew attention to the fact that free access to this database would end in December. Discussions have revealed that with the exception of Science Faculty, there is no support for spending the 5-figure sum required to subscribe to the service. Future provision therefore rests on whether Science Faculty are sufficiently keen to pay for it from their own Library funds.

Reading List Management Project

The Library is taking out a trial subscription to TalisList, a software package for the online management of reading lists, with links to the Library catalogue and web-based resources. The software will be loaded at the beginning of November, following which appropriate Library staff will be trained in its use. In due course we will be asking for your reading lists in order that we can run a pilot service; if successful, and popular with academic staff, this will lead to a full-blown resource list management service being operated from next academic year. We will also be looking at building in links to texts digitised under the CLA scanning licence.

New design for University website

Readers will have noticed that the promised re-design has now been implemented. Sadly, there is no longer a link to the Library website direct from the home page. The quickest way, though there are others, is to click on ‘Staff and students’ on the home page; there is a link to the Library on the next level down. If you wish to comment on the new University site, you are encouraged to send your views to newwebsite@port.ac.uk.

Linking to journal articles using DOIs

Do you link to e-journal articles from your reading lists or from WebCT? If so, you might like to think about incorporating Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) into your links. URLs can change, but DOIs are designed to remain persistent so that links to electronic journal articles do not get broken. For this reason they are much better to use than URLs pasted in from the browser. Many e-journal providers are assigning DOIs to uniquely identify their articles: for example, 10.1016/0144-8188(96)00026-9 is a DOI taken from a hit list in Science Direct. For articles from most recognised information providers, you can turn a DOI into a URL link simply by adding the prefix http://dx.doi.org/, so that the URL for the DOI above would be 
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0144-8188(96)00026-9. However, always try the link before using it just to make sure!

For more information about DOIs, go to 
http://www.doi.org/index.html