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Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Ebrary online book trial
The library is currently hosting a trial of 'Ebrary', an online academic book provider. Ebrary has about 30,000 book titles in it's collection from a wide range of subject areas. Ebrary does require special software to run (the 'Ebrary Reader') which BUCS have installed on the PCs in the library. You may need to check with your departmental IT people in order to browse this trial from your office or departmental lab, or alternatively the library will be running a number of hands-on information sessions in our level 5 training room. I will send out training session times as they come to hand. Details of Ebrary are available from http://site.ebrary.com/lib/bathuni.
Those of you who use a feedreader for alerting may be interested to learn that Zetoc is now syndicating Table of Contents alerts via RSS.
Zetoc is a bibliographic service providing access to the British Library's huge electronic table of contents of journal articles and conference proceedings.
The feed gives the journal title with the ISSN and publisher and the individual article title with a description that includes the author name(s), journal title, issue and page number(s). Each article has a link to the full record page in Zetoc. The information that you see displayed will depend upon the RSS reader that you are using.
I can help set this system up for anyone who may be interested.
We now have access to over 400 ejournal titles via Wiley Interscience. You can find a list of titles available via the A-Z ejournals list on the library website or from here.
JSTOR has announced additions to their collections, and changes to some of the journals in the Biological sciences collection, increasing the moving wall. Details are below:
*Bernoulli (Arts & Sciences Complement) Release Content: Vols. 1 -- 6, 1995-2000 Moving Wall: 5 years Publisher: International Statistical Institute (ISI) and Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability ISSN: 1350-7265
*The Canadian Journal of Statistics / La Revue Canadienne de Statistique (Arts & Sciences Complement) Release Content: Vols. 1 -- 30, 1973-2002 Moving Wall: 3 years Publisher: Statistical Society of Canada ISSN: 0319-5724
By publisher request, JSTOR is increasing the moving walls for six journals: * Conservation Biology (Biological Sciences and Ecology & Botany Collections) Moving Wall: 10 years (previously 3 years) Publisher: Blackwell Publishing ISSN: 0888-8892
*Diversity and Distributions (Biological Sciences and Ecology & Botany Collections) Moving Wall: 10 years (previously 3 years) Publisher: Blackwell Publishing ISSN: 1366-9516
*Global Ecology and Biogeography (Biological Sciences and Ecology & Botany Collections) Moving Wall: 10 years (previously 3 years) Publisher: Blackwell Publishing ISSN: 1466-822x
*Journal of Biogeography (Biological Sciences and Ecology & Botany Collections) Moving Wall: 10 years (previously 3 years) ISSN: 0305-0270
Microsoft have launched a product to compete with Google Scholar. Microsoft Live Academic is in beta version, found at http://academic.live.com. Currently content covers just Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Physics with more than 6 million records from approximately 4300 journals and 2000 conferences - they say more subject coverage is coming based on how this beta product goes. See an overview and comments at ResourceShelf.com. University of Bath users should be able to use Live Academic and follow the links to full text of journals we subscribe to with the usual BUCS username and password if off campus.
Reviews.com have asked us to trial an online service they offer in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for Computing Reviews. We currently take the ACM Computing Reviews in print and it is not covered by the ACM Digital Library. Reviews.com have given us access to Computing Reviews online for the month of April 2006. Computing Reviews is a monthly journal that publishes critical reviews on a broad range of computing subjects, including models of computation, formal languages, computational complexity theory, analysis of algorithms, and logics and semantics of programs. Please trial Computing Reviews online at www.reviews.com if you are on campus. Off campus follow this link - you will need your BUCS username and password.
Please let me know of any comments, suggestions or feedback.
Nature.com has gone weblog crazy! The editors of various Nature journals are contributing to weblogs, discussing recent articles and events. Take a look at the following: Action Potential from Nature Neuroscience The Sceptical Chymist from Nature Chemistry Free Association from Nature Genetics.
Actually Nature.com is doing some really fantastics things with social technologies. Not only are they blogging and have set up RSS feeds from various locations on their website, they have a social bookmarking tool, 'Connotea' which allows you to share articles with colleagues and friends, and they're podcasting (sending out audio files each week that you can listen to on your computer, Ipod or mp3 player). The icing on the cake is their mash-up of Google Earth to show how the H5N1 strain of the avian flu is travelling. It's very impressive - make sure you go via the library website to the Nature ejournal link so you can access the full text of any articles discussed.
The Easter vacation... as good a time as any to sit down with a cup of coffee and finally get around to looking through the publisher catalogues you've been carefully tossing in a box in your office somewhere to catch up with later... Our financial year end is sneaking up so now is the time to send in your text book and recommended reading orders. Thanks, Kara.
Library open hours for the Easter vacation are available from the library website at http://www.bath.ac.uk/library/open/#Easter Normal opening hours resume on Saturday 22nd April 2006.
We will shortly have access to the Wiley Interscience ejournal collection. This is a collection of over 690 journals covering a variety of disciplines, and includes a number of journals that I have had enquiries about over the last semester such as 'Zoo Biology', 'Hepatology' and 'Yeast' for Biology and Biochemistry, and 'Random Structures and Algorithms' for Mathematics. You can find a reasonably up to date excel file of the journals included in this package here - there are minor changes, details of which can be found on the Wiley Interscience website.
I imagine access to Wiley will be enabled from the library A-Z ejournal list by Easter. This really is a significant addition to our ejournal collection. It would be useful to know whether anyone is accessing these or any of the library subscribed resources with a mobile device like a PDA.
