New books in the library...

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

Not too many books on this month's list, but we do have the new 2nd edition of Rolls' "Classic studies in  psychology". We also have several new e-books, including the 2nd edition of Martha Cottam's "Introduction to political psychology" and Graham Towl's brand new book, "Forensic psychology". All items (including e-books) can be located via the library catalogue.

European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL)...

…is available via the library. We even had a dedicated training room and advisers available at the Docklands Campus Library. It is a widely recognised computer qualification and a valuable addition to your CV in a competitive jobs market. Whether you are a total novice with computers or consider yourself a bit of an expert, the qualification is well worth getting. For more information, check out the library’s ECDL web page.

Vacation access to other university libraries...

…is available through the SCONUL Vacation Access scheme. If you live closer to another university, or would simply like to access another university’s library, then during holiday time it is normally possible to gain access using your student card. Information is available from the following webpage: SCONUL Vacation Access. It is strongly recommended that you telephone the library of the university you wish to visit before going, because arrangements can vary.

A bit of light relief...

…and maybe a few interesting insights, too, are just what's required as the exam season draws to a close. The recently televised BBC Big Personality Test has so far had well over 200,000 participants in its online test. Clearly people enjoy doing these things and ‘finding out’ something about themselves in the process. Well, either that, or they want to ‘confirm’ their own beliefs about themselves e.g. that they really are an extrovert / a hypochondriac / 'conscientious' / 'agreeable' or whatever it might be.

If you enjoy doing these tests (and I must admit to being rather partial myself), then why not check out the following website: TESTdex.com. I have no idea about the scientific basis of these free tests, so wouldn’t recommend using them in your studies, but for a bit of time out, why not give one or two (or three or four!) a go? Who knows, you might even find inspiration in them...

The Library's Research Support Portal...

…has just been launched on our website. Set up by our specialist Research Services Librarian, it gives quick access to all the key information about library services for researchers. Areas featured include: placing interlibrary loans, referencing help (including Endnote), accessing other libraries and how to find further support. It is accessible from here: Research Support Portal.

New books in the library...

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

With the academic year almost over, book funds were almost fully spent so there are only five books on this month's list, including two e-books. However, having received a small amount of additional funds in recent weeks, next month's list should be rather longer, so keep your eyes peeled for the June list!

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.