IS News Blog

Following problems with access yesterday, ScienceDirect is again available through the A-Z list of online resources.

 

Elizabeth Andrews

Subject Librarian

Following maintenance at the weekend, ScienceDirect is not yet available. For more information, please contact the Information Centre: infocentre@stir.ac.uk or the Library Help Desk: library@stir.ac.uk.

Elizabeth Andrews

Subject Librarian

ScienceDirect will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance for approximately 12 hours from 1:00PM GMT Saturday, 23 January to 1:00AM GMT Sunday, 24 January.

Berg, Edinburgh University Press, and Oxford Univeristy Press have all finalised negotiations with SHEDL (Scottish Higher Education Digital Library). This will give the University access to many of the journals produced by these publishers at a very small additional cost, and in the case of Berg no cost at all, as we currently do not subscribe to any their titles.

 

A further deal has been signed with Portico, which is a digital preservation service for electronic journals and electronic books. Access to material which Portico holds only becomes accessible when a trigger event occurs such as a publisher going out of business. This provides us with access to a secure electronic archive should the worst occur and the electronic version of a journal becomes unavailable.  

 

We now have access to the journals, and details of each one has been added to the library catalogue. The most recent issue of each journal is available, as well as several years of previous issues, although this does depend on the individual title.

 

SHEDL is a purchasing consortium made up of all Scottish Higher Education Institutions. By negotiating as a single group, SHEDL has been able to secure agreements with 6 academic publishers as well as Portico. The scheme benefits publishers by reducing their administrative costs and SHEDL members benefit through increased access to valuable resources. Similar schemes to SHEDL have already been in place in Scandinavia and Ireland for some time. It is hoped that as more publishers are included it will have significant benefits to those working in research pools as all institutions will have access to the same resources.

 

 

 

Alasdair Stewart

Senior Subject Librarian

Tell us what you want your students to read so we can make it available in the Library. We need all of your reading lists not just your TalisList electronic reading lists. Email us your reading lists for Spring Semester 2010 by Friday 22nd January 2010.

 

 

 

We will strive to make the material on all of your lists available in the Library so give us your lists in plenty of time to make sure we can do this. Because History reading lists are generally much larger, we require more time to process them. The deadline for submitting History lists will therefore be two weeks before the deadline for other subjects. There will be advance notice of the earlier deadline.

 

• Structuring your lists with subheadings (such as essential reading, background / contextualisation, suggested / further reading) may increase clarity for your students (Note: Reading lists for History modules are a little different and do not need to distinguish between key and supplementary material. We will create a TalisList of the whole reading list)
• Double-check that the titles and other details you give us are as complete and accurate as possible
• The Library encourages the use of electronic reading lists, but even if you decide not to use this service, please continue to send us copies of your reading lists so that we can ensure that the material you have selected for assignments, tutorials, exams and all other teaching is available in the Library.

 

Attach your reading list in an email to: Reading Lists (or rl12@stir.ac.uk) and tell us:

1. Module (or programme) code
2. Title for the module
3. Course coordinator
4. Semester (or other dates) the course is running
5. Estimate of student numbers
6. Whether the course is by distance learning
7. If you know DOIs for references please include these – they can significantly speed up list creation
8. Please mark on the list whether you would like references made available in digital format – we will investigate the options/costs and get back to you with details. For example we can obtain digital copies of book chapters or journal articles that are not already available in electronic format.
9. If you don’t want an electronic reading list created

 

For more information on reading lists and the electronic reading list service, TalisList, click here or contact Reading Lists.

 

Elizabeth Andrews

Subject librarian

 

January 2009 – some photos of the frozen campus on a slide around (not on!) the loch. Photos taken with a camera phone.

Wallace monument with loch in foreground

Dumyat with frozen loch in foreground

 

Frozen loch

 

Wallace monument again

Naughty folk walking on water