The Virtual Training Suite

The Virtual Training Suite is a set of free Internet tutorials to help you develop Internet research skills for your university course. All of the tutorials are written and reviewed by a national team of lecturers and librarians from universities across the UK. The interactive, teach-yourself tutorials take around an hour to complete - you simply work through the material in your own time at your own pace. By the end of them you should have a good idea of how to find the best sites on the Web that are appropriate for university work, and you will understand how critical thinking can improve the quality of your online research. There are 60 tutorials in total, covering every subject, so don’t miss out on this resource!

Meet your Academic Services Librarian #2

This term we will do a series of posts introducing you to the members of the Academic Services Team. This time it is the Information Studies and Management and Business librarian.

Anita Saycell
Having spent many voluntary hours from the age of 14 working in my local public library (not all Essex girls spend their time going out) my library career was starting to take shape. Next step was a paid job in the public library before heading West and studying for a Librarianship degree in Aberystwyth. An Assistant Librarian post at the Home Office followed, and then I joined Information Services at Aberystwyth University in 2003. When not working I have an active toddler to keep up with and any spare time left I teach swimming and enjoy walking, cycling and generally being outdoors.

Also see: a day in the life of a librarian.

Sources For Courses: Primo (Part 2)

In my last post we had a look at the basics of Primo, the University's library catalogue. Hopefully that should have given you enough information about how to search for a book and locate it in the library. Let's now explore the more advanced and personalised features the catalogue has to offer, and how it can help manage your work in the library more effectively.

Before doing anything it's always best to Sign In using your Aber username and password. This is especially important now because it gives us access to the features we're about to look at.

National Library of Wales welcome sessions

Aberystwyth residents are lucky to have the National Library of Wales on our doorstep. The National Library has an amazing collection of resources and at the moment it is offering daily welcome sessions aimed at introducing the library and facilities to any new readers (along with sessions on other topics, all free). You can register for the sessions online and there is information about getting a reader's ticket here.

Information Services: tell us what you think about the printing/copying/scanning service

During the week beginning 07 November 2011 you have the chance to tell us what we've done right and how we can improve the printing/copying/scanning service. There is an option to be entered into a draw for a prize of a £30 Amazon voucher. Go to: www.survey.bris.ac.uk/aber/suggestions11

Stuck on that first academic assignment?

Come to: Step in, step up, steps to success!

• Win a Samsung netbook!
• Free snacks
• Share your study hints and tips, and the challenges too

12:30-15:30 on Wednesday 2nd November in Hugh Owen Library.
and bring your questions for:

• Daniel Butler, University Writing Fellow
• John Morgan, Student Support
• Julie Keenan, Careers
• Robin Chapman, Department of Welsh
• Information Services

Any enquiries to: acastaff@aber.ac.uk

Rare seaside postcards and political cartoons launched online

 

Rare seaside postcards once considered too saucy for publication are among 35,000 images to be launched online for the benefit of education and research. The images have been digitised and catalogued by the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent.

Meet your Academic Services Librarian #1

This term we will do a series of posts introducing you to the members of the Academic Services Team. We'll start with the Academic Services Manager and Law Librarian. Take it away Lillian...

Lillian Stevenson
I have been working in Information Services and the Library at Aberystwyth University for a fair few years and like a lot of people studied at Aber too.

Sources For Courses: Primo (Part 1)

Of all the resources the University subscribes to, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll be using Primo right from the start of your degree.

As the library catalogue, Primo gives Aberystwyth University students details on all items in the University libraries, as well as a vast range of online databases to further your research. It also acts as the access point for your library account, enabling you to view and renew loans, pay your fines and request books from our External Store.

Finding a book in the library

Here's our new video that gives you a step by step guide to finding the book you need.

Sources For Courses: House of Commons Parliamentary Papers

Whether you’re studying Politics, Law, History, or are simply curious about the inner workings of Parliament, you’ll find a wealth of information to fuel your research at the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers database (HCPP).

Free to all Aberystwyth University students and staff, HCPP provides users with an extensive database of Parliamentary Papers, spanning from 2004 all the way back to 1688. You’ll find documents that have shaped the way Britain is governed, including bills that have been discussed in both the Houses of Commons and Lords before being made into legislation.

Sources for Courses: Beyond Google Maps ... EDINA Digimap Collections

By Rosie Atherton (former IS Graduate Trainee)
As a self-confessed addict to Google Maps, I would thoroughly recommend spending an hour or two immersing yourself in the fantastically absorbing world of EDINA Digimap Collections.

EDINA Digimap Collections are subscribed to by Aberystwyth University, allowing all University students and staff the opportunity to become registered Digimap users… and all for free! As a registered user, you will be able to access Historic Digimap, Geology Digimap and also the Ordnance Survey collection.

Birth of modern China in massive online archive

8,000 rare photographs of Chinese life in the early twentieth century have just launched online through the Visualising China project, a unique virtual archive giving researchers new opportunities to explore and interact with images of China taken between 1850-1950.

Sources for Courses: new additions for modern Wales at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Visit the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) or visit via Databases A-Z in Primo http://primo.aber.ac.uk/.

In their “focus on Modern Wales” in May, the ODNB added 45 biographies of men and women who, “shaped the history of Welsh culture, politics, industry and sport”.

Connected Histories

Connected Histories provides a single point of access to a wide range of distributed digital resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British history. It allows structured searching by names, places, and dates and provides access to millions of pages of text, hundreds of thousands of words and tens of thousands of maps and images. With the click of a mouse, researchers can find rich bodies of evidence for virtually any topic in British history; whether royal weddings, parliamentary reform movements, famous criminals, or the lives of plebeian Londoners.

Resource updates from ProQuest: Thursday 9th June

ProQuest’s Rebecca Price is visiting Information Services on the morning of Thursday 9th June to provide three update sessions on the new ProQuest platform and the ProQuest resources to which we subscribe.

200 years of news!

- Search the full text
- See articles as part of the page they were printed on
- Sort search results by news, feature, image and advertisement
- See your search term highlighted on the page image
- Pick a date and browse that issue

'Welcome to your Library 2010' wins an award

For September 2010 Information Services redesigned the library induction experience for undergraduates. We wanted students' first experiences of the library to be informative but also enjoyable and engaging, so we re-thought every aspect of the induction: location, content, marketing, timetabling, technologies, even seating - hence the famous beanbags! As a result we won the 'Highly Commended' award in the Welsh Marketing Innovation Awards (Higher Education category) for our 'Welcome to your Library 2010' sessions, most of which took place on the 27th-30th September, 10am-5pm each day.

The Book is dead; long live the Book.

Nineteen years ago I attended a workshop organised by the British Council in Manchester. A facilitator at the workshop predicted the death of the “book” before the turn of the next century. Two decades on and the “book” still lives, albeit wearing different cloaks, one of which is the “e-cloak”. There is no doubt that e-books, i.e. digital versions of text-based materials, have captured the imagination of our society and impacted on the relationship between library users and information service providers.

Exam Skills - 'What We Really Think'

A two part video created to support the Exam Skills event run by Information Services. Students talk about their examination experiences and study preferences.

Top 10 items in CADAIR - January 2011

1. Acid damage to vegetation following the Laki Fissure eruption in 1783 - an historical review (Grattan, John et al) (2160/225) Full Text viewed 307 times

2. 'No Longer Lost for Words: Antigone's Afterlife' (Forsyth, Alison) (2160/2435) Full Text viewed 256 times

3. Redesigning health administration for the medical profession (Preston, Hugh et al) (2160/1814) DOI accessed 243 times

Work smarter – study skills for students in BlackBoard

Undergraduates looking to refresh their study skills can now enrol on a non-credit bearing BlackBoard module and choose classes from the Undergraduate Study Practices programme.

Library induction and learner transition

I joined Aberystwyth University in September this year. In my previous job at the University of Leicester, I was involved in a project which investigated student transition into higher education. One major finding of the project was students' characterisation of various types of information presented to them before and during their first few days in University:

• Objective, highly structured formal information = Cold Knowledge
• Less structured, semi-formal information = Warm knowledge
• Informal, less structured and subjective information = Hot knowledge (1)

From PLACES to SPACES: Learning environments that inspire.

The imaginative design of spaces to shape learning behaviour is a topic that has always fascinated me. I grew up in an era where the idea was promoted that learning occurred only in a PLACE (Pupil, Lessons, Authority of the teacher, Classroom and Examination). Over the past decades there has been a paradigm shift which now promotes the idea of learning environments as SPACES (Social, Participatory, Adaptable, Collaborative, Enhanced-technologically and Sharing).