IS News Blog

The new EThOS service from the British Library aims to make the full text of UK PhD theses available online for free. PhD and other Doctoral graduates may well remember the feeling of relief when they finally handed in the bound copies of their thesis. However, destined for closed access library stacks, the majority of theses sit gathering dust, rarely used and rarely read. A vast quantity of significant research is held within the thousands of theses stored by university libraries in the UK.

 

With the launch of The Electronic Theses Online System (EThOS) all this has changed. EThOS is a national initiative covering theses from institutions throughout the UK. The central system will be housed at the British Library and it will be the first point of call for anyone seeking to access a UK thesis. This major UK Project, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), is working to make this important strand of the research literature available electronically online. EThOS will digitise paper theses on request by a researcher and will then make the thesis available online for other researchers. The full text of PhD theses will be free at the point of use for anyone who wants to read it.

 

The University of Stirling is a member of EThOS and Stirling’s recent theses will be included in EThOS, as well as in our own Repository: STORRE. Usage statistics for existing theses repositories in other parts of the world have demonstrated that there is a great deal of interest in this type of material. The major advantage of making your thesis available online is that it will be accessible worldwide to anyone with an interest in your area of research. Wider availability of research material such as theses is supported by UK universities and funding bodies, and EThOS will be an important step towards achieving this goal.
Stirling PhD theses completed since September 2006 onwards will automatically be included in the EThOS service, so you need take no further action for your thesis to be included. However, if you have an electronic copy of your thesis that is older than September 2006 and you wish it to be included in EThOS please contact: Clare Allan, email: c.m.allan@stir.ac.uk. Do not send theses directly to the British Library.

 

If for any reason you do not wish your thesis to be digitised you should contact Clare Allan, email: mailto:c.m.allan@stir.ac.uk.
If you have any questions about EThOS, please visit the EThOS website at http://www.ethos.ac.uk/ or the EThOS toolkit at http://ethostoolkit.cranfield.ac.uk/.

 

Clare Allan

ATLA, IPSA and the Philosopher’s Index now have a new look. Previously available on the Ovid Silver Platter interface, the content of the databases remains the same, and you can still link to full text online resources via the WebBridge button. Simultaneous searching of two or more databases is also still possible. Access them from the A-Z of online resources.

 

ATLA: the main database for religious studies. Covers journal articles, essays and book reviews on biblical studies, world religions, church history and religious perspectives on social issues.

IPSA (International Political Science Abstracts): the main database for politics. Contains information from the major journals and yearbooks worldwide in the field of political science, including public law, international law, and international relations.

Philosopher’s Index: the main database for philosophy. Indexes articles in journals and books on aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, logic, metaphysics and philosophy of various disciplines, e.g. education, history, law, religion, science.

 

Helen Beardsley
Senior Subject Librarian (Arts)

WebCT will be unavailable for the upgrades to version 8.0.1 and disk storage on Saturday, 16 th August. I expect the system to be down between 10.00-14.00. The upgrade of the file storage should bring performance and stability benefits.

 

WebCT 8 is not a major upgrade (there was no WebCT 7) but rather some housekeeping by Blackboard, the company that produces WebCT. Essentially Blackboard are bringing together the numbering of their two product lines (Blackboard Classic and WebCT). There are a number of bug fixes in release 8 and the service pack that takes us to version 8.0.1. Further details about WebCT 8 can be found in the May 2008 Issue.

 

http://intranet.stir.ac.uk/issue/ISSUE72_May2008.pdf

 

Please note that during the upgrade process there will need to be a number of WebCT restarts, making the system appear to be available for short periods (up to 15 minutes). An announcement will be placed in WebCT when the installation is complete and the system is safe to use.

 

Simon Booth
WebCT Administrator

Throughout the summer the Stirling campus Library is hosting a display of posters outlining current research taking place at the University. The display can be found on Level 2, close to the entrance. If you can not make it into the Library we have created an online exhibition to highlight recent publications by Stirling researchers from across the University. View online exhibition

 

The staff email system is being improved by the replacement of all of the servers and the storage hardware, and implementation of the latest version of the email server software (Microsoft Exchange 2007). These changes will make the system faster and more resilient in the event of hardware failures. The standard mail quota is also being doubled to 200MB per user.

 

The new equipment and software is now in place and all mailboxes now need to be moved from the old email servers to the new. Because of the large volume of data being transferred small groups of mailboxes will be moved at a time, usually in the evening or overnight. Each group of users will be informed before their mailboxes are moved.

 

The majority of users will continue to use the same desktop email software they use now (Outlook 2003) therefore the look and feel will not change. However, the Web Access client has been substantially improved – to look and behave much more like the desktop client.

The upgrade of the system also allows Systems and Network Services to make the further improvement to spam handling previously mentioned – namely that tagged messages scoring under 15 will be automatically delivered to the Junk Email folder regardless of any Inbox rules which the user may have set up.

More information on the changes, including advice for users of mail client software other than Outlook, can be found at http://www.is.stir.ac.uk/itsupport/email/servermove.php

Alan Richardson
Systems and Network Services Manager