Meet Your Academic Services Librarian

This is a series of posts introducing you to the members of the Academic Services Team.

Amy Staniforth

Tanzania

My name is Amy Staniforth and I came to libraries and archives via academia. After an undergraduate degree in American and Canadian Studies at Birmingham University – with a year at University of California Santa Barbara (!) - and an MA in Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno (the first place to offer the MA programme) I did my PhD in African Studies back in Birmingham. Texts and environments of all sorts are always at the heart of my interests – from locally inspired detective fiction to museum displays and the National Geographic’s reporting of the discovery of human ancestors in east Africa – and I love to help people see the potential source material all around them.

Sources for Courses: Bomb Sight

Bomb Sight is a website that transforms records previously only available in The National Archives into an interactive format, granting far greater accessibility to this important historical information. These WW2 bomb census maps from between 7/10/1940 and 06/06/1941 were previously available only in the Reading Room of The National Archives.

The website presents you with a map detailing the locations of specific bombs, and gives information regarding the bomb type and the location in which it fell.

Bomb Sight by University of Portsmouth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Enjoy trial access to scholarly content online

Information Services staff arrange free trials with prestigious publishers so that staff and students can enjoy temporary access to collections of e-books, e-journals and online databases: http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/is/elecinfo/trials/

We also receive notifications when publishers have enabled promotional access to their online content.

Is there any online content you would like to trial?
Let us know by e-mailing acastaff@aber.ac.uk
Campus-wide access is often available.

If you have accessed any of the content we have trialled recently, please contact us with your feedback with regard to its value to your learning, teaching or research. The feedback can help us identify resources to consider for future subscription or purchase.

Drop-in sessions with subject librarians

"I thought Primo was rubbish, but it turned out I was just using it wrongly..."

This academic year the subject librarians have been running drop-in sessions and taking information skills support out of the library and into departments. These drop-in sessions are regular times when you can come along with any questions about library resources, conducting literature reviews, referencing, using Primo etc. No booking required! Just drop in. The sessions run weekly until the end of term unless indicated otherwise, and some of them are new, so do have a look at the table below.

Researching Welsh Law: What is unique in Wales?

An addition to New York University School of Law’s Globalex Foreign Law Research articles is Researching Welsh Law: What is unique in Wales? by Lillian Stevenson, Law Librarian & Academic Services Manager at Aberystwyth University & Dr. Catrin Huws, lecturer and Director of the Centre for Welsh Legal Affairs in the Department of Law and Criminology at Aberystwyth University. It is intended as an introduction to researching Welsh law and covers the following topics:

1. The Welsh Legal System
2. Legal Wales
3. Devolution and the New Legislative Bodies in the UK Bibliography
4. Sources for the legislative process
5. Sources of Welsh legislation: public domain
6. Sources of Welsh legislation: commercial
7. Sources of Welsh legislation in print
8. Referencing and Citing Welsh legal authorities
9. Welsh Law Journals
10. Law Dictionaries – English/Welsh
11. Law Schools in Universities in Wales

You can read the full article here.

The OER mix in higher education: purpose, process, product, and policy

The knowledge and network society of the twenty-first century is driven by the power of the Internet and digital tools. One of its manifestations is a new approach to the production of teaching and learning materials, enabled by participatory media called Open Educational Resources (OER). 

OER success has been reported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA and the Open University in the UK, among others. It is unclear, however, how valuable OERs are in learning and teaching.

This article presents findings on the perceived value of Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher Education and their potential for widening learners’ access to higher education as a direct response to the UK government’s agenda of social inclusion. Evidence was obtained from interviews and an online survey of students,academics, and senior managers.

The article concludes that for OER to have an impact on higher education in terms of learner benefit and social inclusion, institutions need to address the following issues:

• The purpose of Open Educational Resources
• Drivers for production of Open Educational Resources
• Processes involved in Open Educational Resource production that guarantees quality 
• Policies that promote the open sharing of Open Educational Resources

You can read the full article here.