Wednesday 26 May 2010

Keep up-to-date with the latest research output...

…by subscribing to current awareness services such as Zetoc and TicTOCs. Such services enable you to find out about new articles or conference papers in your area of interest, sometimes within 72 hours of publication! All you need to do is set up an ‘alert’ and whenever something new is published you will be notified by email.

Zetoc is freely available to all members of Higher Education institutions, and is updated on a daily basis using the British Library’s Electronic Table of Contents. It currently contains information taken from 20,000 journals and about 16,000 conference proceedings a year, totalling over 37 million records. It lets you set up an unlimited number of alerts and you can request to be notified when a new issue of a journal is published or, perhaps most usefully, when new articles are published in any journal on a topic of your choice. You can even ask to be notified when a particular author publishes a new article. Zetoc also operates an RSS feed service.

TicTOCs is a similar service to Zetoc, but features about 2,300 journals not in Zetoc (equally Zetoc contains about 17,400 not in TicTOCs – statistics taken from the TicTOCs blog). TicTOCs is completely free to use – you do not need to belong to an HE institution. As well as having some additional journals not featured in Zetoc, it also has the advantage of containing abstracts for some journal articles.

Friday 21 May 2010

Support for international students...

...is available via the library webpages. Visit the Library and Learning Services International Students webpage for information on what we have to offer. This includes a number of bilingual and multilingual staff and some specially tailored training sessions.

Tuesday 18 May 2010

UEL Subject Librarians are only an email, webchat...

…appointment or phone call away. Each of the schools at UEL has a dedicated Subject Librarian – me for the School of Psychology – and you can contact us in a myriad of different ways for help with researching for your coursework and any other library or research-related issue (more information on what we do is available here: Subject Support for staff and students). For example, you might want to pop into any of the three campus libraries and have a chat with whoever is on the enquiry desk. If you aren’t on campus, then you can e-mail or telephone your Subject Librarian - contact details are on our website. You could also use the Ask-a-Librarian service – which operates as an email enquiry service and, between 1-5pm on weekdays during term-time, as a live webchat – or even book a one-to-one appointment with your own Subject Librarian. There really is no excuse not to get in touch!

Friday 14 May 2010

Getting hold of books and journals we don't stock...

...is made easy with our Inter-Library Loan (ILL) service. Simply sign in to the library catalogue, access your library account and choose to 'Place ILL Request'. We will then try to get hold of a copy for you from another library. This service is available free of charge, although the following limits apply: all second and third year undergraduates are allowed five requests per year, all postgraduates are allowed twenty requests, all staff, researchers and doctoral students are allowed unlimited requests. Further information is available here.

Alternatively, if you search on WorldCat then you can find the nearest library which stocks the book or journal you are looking to get hold of. You can then pay that library a visit, although a SCONUL Access card may be required for access other university libraries.

Tuesday 11 May 2010

Better searching in Google...

…can be achieved by using just a few simple search tips. Take the following example: you want to find UK government publications on the future treatment of schizophrenia. While there is no ‘correct’ way of searching for this on Google, I would recommend typing in: 
schizophrenia site:gov.uk OR site:nhs.uk filetype:pdf OR filetype:doc 2011..2025

So what does all that mean?
schizophrenia is the keyword.
site:gov.uk OR site:nhs.uk means that we only want to see results coming from UK government or NHS websites.
filetype:pdf OR filetype:doc means we only want PDF or Word files – the most common format for publications i.e. we don’t want webpages to be returned - we want documents.
2011..2025 is a number range identifying that we want documents which state a date in the future to appear in them (i.e. any date in the range 2011 to 2025).

Tuesday 4 May 2010

New books in the library...

...added to stock during the month of April 2010 can be viewed from this link: April 2010 new books list. Please note that it only lists items purchased for stock from the library's 'psychology' book funds.

Notable additions to stock this month include: "Introduction to forensic psychology (2nd ed.)" by Curt R. Bartol, "Biopsychology (7th edition)" by John Pinel, "Introduction to counselling skills (3rd ed.)" by Richard Nelson-Jones and not forgetting the brand new 4th edition of "Psychology" by Martin, Carlson and Buskist - a core text on many modules.

If you want to borrow any of these titles, then don't forget to check on the library catalogue first to make sure we have copies available. New books are popular and often fly off the shelves straight away! Please let me know if you have questions about any of these new library books.