Within the Aspire reading list software, references link to the book or journal details in the library catalogue, so students can immediately check availability, place holds, etc.  References to our electronic journal articles can link directly to the article.  Lists can include references to paper materials, as well as links to web sites and other electronic resources.  See our Sample Resource List. 

Please note that in 2011 QEC agreed a limit of 100 items on any new reading lists. This is to enable the Library to be able create more lists and enhance the student experience for a greater number of students.

Send us your reading list – we do the rest

All you need to do is attach your reading list as a WORD document in an email to: Reading Lists ( reading.lists@stir.ac.uk)

Include the following details:

• Module (or programme) code
• Title for the module
• Course coordinator
• Semester (or other dates) the course is running – please provide start dates.  If you do not provide start dates we will assume the start of the standard autumn semester, 9 September 2013
• Estimate of student numbers
• Whether the course is a distance learning course
• Whether you consider the item to be purchased, essential or recommended reading
• Please mark on the list whether you would like referenced texts made available in digital format – we will investigate the digitisation options/costs and get back to you with details

Please send your new list by 19 August 2013.   This is because we do a lot of checking in order to ensure the list is accurate, e.g., we check whether there are enough copies in stock, whether we have the required edition in stock, and order any new materials as this can take several weeks.  Reading lists arriving after this deadline will be dealt with on a best endeavours basis.  For any non-standard modules starting later in the semester please allow at least 4 weeks for the list to be created.

Benefits

We’ve had very positive feedback from students about TalisList reading lists, and reading lists are also an important source of information for the Library, helping us ensure that we hold key student texts and enhance the students’ learning experience. In last year’s IS Satisfaction Survey over 80% of students were satisfied or very satisfied with the service. “Every module should use TalisList”

Lisa Haddow
LLD Team Manager
Library
Information Services
University of Stirling
Stirling FK9 4LA
Tel: 01786 467232
Fax: 01786 466866
Email: l.j.haddow@stir.ac.uk

First of all congratulations on your impending graduation!  Here are some useful tips from Information Services on things you should do before you graduate.  You can save yourself a lot of hassle by following these instructions before  you graduate (your network account will be disabled on the night of your graduation so you will not be able to logon to CampusNet, university PCs, print system, online library resources or the portal afterwards).

	Move your data (files/photos etc) from your university Home Folder As you won’t be able to access the university network after graduation, you should take a copy of any files that you currently have on your H drive. The easiest way to move these would be to use a USB stick or connect your own laptop to CampusNet and copy your files to your laptop/external hard drive. If you fail to do this, all is not lost as our Systems team can retrieve data saved on your H folder for up to 6 months after you graduate. However there is a £20 admin charge for backing your files up onto a CD and posting to you.
	Student email account – find out how to access after graduation Those with office365 (Outlook Web App) email accounts (UG and TPG students) will continue to have access to their uni email for 1 year after graduation. You will not be able to login to the portal however, so will have to access OWA via the direct web address: http://office365.stir.ac.uk. It’s worth taking a note of this now. Research Postgraduates – we regret that it is currently not possible to extend Outlook access beyond your graduation date so you should take care to set up a forward on your university email account before you leave. You can also export your mailbox to a file – see our instructions.
	Return your library books and pay off any outstanding fines Please make sure you return your library books and pay outstanding fines by 5th June. Delaying in sorting this out can result in a delay in processing your graduation. You can pay your fines online: go to the portal > Resources tab > ‘pay library fines’. Or you can pay in cash at the Lending Services desk in the Library. Cheques to the Library should be made payable to ‘University of Stirling’.
	Sell any outstanding credit on your print/copy account to a student who is continuing Ideally you shouldn’t have any significant sums left in your print/copy balance but if you do, you can talk to the Information Centre about arranging to sell any left over credit in your account to a student who is continuing on at the university. The IC can then arrange to transfer the credit to the named student. Please note that you cannot be refunded the £6 free allocation per academic year nor any departmentally added funds. There is a £5 minimum transfer level – we won’t transfer amounts smaller than £5. Contact the Information Centre for more help.
	Set up Refworks to allow you to continue using it after you graduate If you use Refworks, you can continue to access your account as an alumni but you must set this up before you lose access to your network account. See our guidance on how to do this.

You can apply for a free RefWorks Alumni Account and transfer your references to it. Alternatively you could transfer your references to a variety of free referencing systems. It is important that you arrange to transfer your references before you actually leave the University as you will require access to the University Portal and your RefWorks account to do this. Find out more on the RefWorks Help pages: http://libguides.stir.ac.uk/refworks-alumni

There will be an Information Services Open User Forum on Tuesday 28 May 2013 at 11.00, 2B87 Stirling Campus.

All staff and students are encouraged to attend, in particular Library representatives in Academic Schools and Administrative Departments, and Students’ Union representatives.

Alison Green, Senior Teaching Fellow, Deputy Director of Teaching and Learning, School of Arts and Humanities will Chair the Forum. The agenda will include Information Strategy, Mobile Devices, Open Access & Research Data Management. Please send any further items for the agenda to IS Office (isoffice@stir.ac.uk) before the meeting, and if possible, by noon on Monday 27May.

Please find below the link to the agenda and previous minutes:

Open User Forum – University of Stirling

IS Office
isoffice@stir.ac.uk

Propose an innovative and transformative project that answers a research question using the British Library’s digital collections / data and if your idea is chosen, the Labs team will work with you to make it happen and you could win a prize of up to £3,000.

From the digitisation of thousands of books, newspapers and manuscripts, the collecting of UK websites, bird sounds or location data for our maps, over the last two decades we’ve been faithfully amassing a vast and wide-ranging digital collection for the nation. What remains elusive however is understanding what researchers need in place in order to unlock the potential for new discoveries within these fascinating and diverse digital collections. The Labs competition is designed to attract scholars, explorers and trailblazers to the Library who see the potential for new and innovative research lurking within these immense digital collections. Through soliciting innovative and transformative projects utilising this content you will be giving us a steer as to the types of platforms, arrangements, services and tools needed to surface it. We’ll even throw the Library’s resources behind you to make your idea a reality.

To find out more, visit the competition pages http://labs.bl.uk/Competition+2013 (deadline for submission of ideas is the 26 June 2013), sign up to the wiki, express your interest and participate in one of the related events, virtually (17 May 2013, 1500 GMT), hack event in London on the 28 and 29 May, 2013 or one of our roadshow events,

A series of five free webinars are available in May to introduce the resources of the UK Data Service. These will be of particular interest to researchers in Social Science disciplines. Places are allocated on a first come, first served basis and can be booked at the links below.

Session One: An introduction to the data available from the UK Data Service Monday 13th May at 11am.

An overview of the types of data available, including UK government surveys, cross-national surveys, data from the UK Census and qualitative data. The webinar will include some case studies demonstrating how the data have been used in research.

Attendees are also encouraged to attend the Thursday webinar to learn how to find and access specific data collections.

Session Two: Broadening Access: Improving the impact of social data, Tuesday 14th May at 16:30

Panel discussion with Keith Dugmore, a private-sector data consultant and owner of Demographic Decisions, and Sharon Witherspoon, Director of the Nuffield Foundation and one of the original researchers on the British Social Attitudes Survey.

Session Three: Looking After and Managing your Research Data, Wednesday 15th May at 16:00

A practical session for anyone actively creating social science research data. You will learn about practices, resources and support available to create well organised, well documented, high-quality research data through the course of your research so that your data continues to generate impact after you have analysed it yourself.

Session Four: UnDISCOVERed Riches: Finding and Accessing Data via the UK Data Service, Thursday 16th May at 15:00

A practical overview, focusing on the service’s new search-and-browse portal, Discover, which allows users to search for datasets, support guides, case studies, ESRC outputs, variables and questions.

A useful follow-up to the Monday webinar introducing data available through the UK Data Service.

Session Five: An Introduction to 2011 Census Geography, Friday 17th May at 15:00

An introduction to census output geographies, outlining five key differences between 2001 and 2011 census output geographies.

More information about data management at Stirling can be found on our researcher web pages.

This week, some students will have had difficulty in connecting to the Portal between 09:00 and 09:35 on the morning of Wednesday 1st May when module registration for the autumn semester opened.

When module registration first goes live, there is an enormous peak in the number of people trying to connect so the connection pool for the portal is very quickly exhausted, resulting in lots of people being unable to login until somebody else logs out. We are often asked why we don’t do something to prevent this happening. Suggestions from students include: get a better system; make the Portal work; get different years to pick their modules at different times etc.  The first two points relate to the technical infrastructure whilst the final point looks at the business logic.

Extensive technical measures have been put in place to help increase Portal stability and availability however we are fully aware that more can be done. Below summarises why for business reasons module registration takes place in the way that it does.

On the suggestion of staggering opening times of module selection for different years/groups, Student Administration have advised that, whilst that might work in a university with more constrained choices, it would be less effective for Stirling because our degree programmes are so flexible, and so different groups of students will take the same modules. So, for example:

• If we opened up registration for 4^th year before 3^rd year, the 3^rd year students would be disadvantaged, as the 4^th years would get first pick of the capped level 10 modules;
• Similarly, both 2^nd and 3^rd years take level 9 modules, and both 1^st and 2^nd years take level 8 – so the years can’t be split without someone losing out;
• If we opened up registration for, say, single Honours in a subject before combined Honours, the combined Honours students would feel disadvantaged;
• We have around 100 combined Honours programmes, and each subject combines with several others, which means that splitting into subject groups in a way that disadvantages no-one is effectively impossible.

The key difficulty is that in some academic areas, the number of places on each module is very limited, which generates a peak of demand as soon as module registration opens. The majority of students who are anxious to register very early on day one are looking to take one or more of these restricted modules, and so are from the same subset of programmes. A proposal will be put to the Education and Student Experience Committee to reduce the capping of modules so that this pressure is removed – essentially meaning that students would not feel they have to register in the first hour to get the modules they want to take.

On the issue of the system/making the Portal work better:

The Portal acts as a gatekeeper for the underlying student database, and manages the number of connections so as not to cause the database or the database server to fail and thereby lose data. The student database server is due for replacement and this has been scheduled for summer 2013.  This should allow IS to increase the number of connections which can be managed concurrently.

IS carefully monitors the status of the Portal and the student database during module registration. While it may have appeared that the portal was unavailable immediately after 9am, there were 877 students undertaking and completing module registration in the first hour. By 09.35 performance had returned to normal – ie the massive increase in connection requests had returned to a more normal level.

• It is worth noting that on a typical Wednesday morning between 9am and 10am the student database handles around 2500 transactions per hour, on 1.5.2013 between 9am and 10am the system handled 111700 student system transactions, which is a 43x increase on usual morning workload for the database.

As well as monitoring the Portal, IS notifies all staff ahead of the big day and asks them not to use the Portal for other purposes so as to maximise the available connections for our students.

Hopefully, the combination of requesting capped modules to be reduced; minimising Portal use for other purposes on module registration day along with a new, more powerful database server will address the concerns for next time.

Finally the new version of Write-N-Cite is now available for staff computers from Run Advertised Programmes. The Write-N-Cite Mini Guide with instructions on downloading and using WNC4 is now available.

Why use WNC 4?

Write-N-Cite is an add-in programme for Word which synchronises with your RefWorks database so that you can create in-text citations and automatically produce your bibliography. WNC4 has a number of advantages over earlier versions including:

• WNC appears in a RefWorks tab in Word
• Citations are automatically formatted in your text as you enter them e.g. (Smith 2010). The old WNC3 gave you a place holder e.g. {{Smith}} which had to be updated when you created your bibliography.
• You can create your bibliography at any time and it will be continuously updated as you add more citations.
• It is really easy to use footnote styles e.g. Chicago and OSCOLA with WNC4

A little bit of caution

As when using any new software, we recommend that you test how it works first e.g. try it out on a test document or copy of your document before you actually convert your thesis, journal article etc..

If you have almost completed writing up your thesis, you might wish to continue with WNC3 or your existing citation method rather than trying something new.

You can only use WNC3 or WNC4 but not both. Contact the Library if you have questions.

WNC 4 for Students

WNC 4 will be available in IT Labs and the Library next Semester. Currently students can use WNC 3 on university PCs or alternatively can download WNC 4 to their own device from RefWorks Tools. Note: it is not possible to use both WNC 3 and WNC 4 – you have to stick with one or the other.

Need help with revising?(With thanks to Heather Dawson, LSE Library)

 Find books on study skills to brush up your knowledge try the Ultimate study Skills ebook

Search the library catalogue for other study skills books  – use a Keyword search and type in Study skills 

Online study skills advice and courses The Open University has a very good site with online resources covering all aspects of organising study.

The Guardian has some basic tips on maintaining health during the exam period

Learning Higher has some online line tools about time management. Find out where your time goes using this time management plan.

If you like technology try these free apps:

Time management

• Remember the Milk lets you organise and prioritise lists, revision sessions, reminders and tasks
• Create your own revision timetable using Get revising
• Exam Countdown – Richard Knights, iPhone/iPad. Counting down the days, hours and minutes until the next exam. Being able to visualise the order of exams may help you prioritise revision sessions for each subject and effectively prepare for exams.

Mind Maps

• Create your own mind map iMindMap  One for visual thinkers and learners, iMindMap is a brilliant mind mapping application that turns an iPad or iPhone into a personal brainstorming and thought-structuring device. May also be useful for dyslexic students

Writing skills

• Oxford A-Z of Grammar and Punctuation

Finally don’t lose hope see these revision cartoons.

Information Services would like to hear about your usage of mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets. This will assist in us catering our services towards the devices you use.

Please complete the 2 minute survey below and enter your student email address when prompted. You will then be entered into our prize draw to win a Google Nexus 7, a 7″ tablet that works with both Campusnet and student email!

To take part in the survey please click below:

http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/stirling/mobiles