ARMS: read-only from Monday 13th October 2014

The ARMS reading list service will now go read-only from Monday 13th October - a little earlier than previously advertised.
Reading lists for Semester Two and beyond can be added to Aspire Reading Lists.

If you need to keep making changes to a Semester One list, you can save the list content to a text file or Excel spreadsheet.

• Text file: open your list in ARMS and on the left click Print List. In your browser, choose Save As or Save Page and choose the file type .txt
• Excel spreadsheet: open your list in ARMS and copy the URL. In a new Excel spreadsheet, click Data then From Web and paste the URL into the Address field. Scroll down and click the yellow arrow next to each field you wish to retain, then click Import.

Training for academic and administrative staff will be available in Hugh Owen and Thomas Parry libraries soon, or by arrangement at a place and time convenient to you.
Please feel free to contact the subject librarians with any questions you have: acastaff@aber.ac.uk

The Times Digital Archive. From the end of Solidarity to President Obama.

Quiz time. What have the following events all got in common: the end of Solidarity; the opening of the Channel Tunnel; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the creation of the Eurozone; the England football team being beaten (repeatedly!) on penalties; the release of the movie trilogy of The Lord of the Rings; and the election of America’s first black president? Any ideas? No? Well let me tell you. These life-changing events all took place in the twenty two years between 1986 and 2008.

This same period is now being covered by The Times Digital Archive. This fantastic resource originally offered two hundred years’ worth of digital versions of its newspapers dating from 1785 to 1985. That coverage has now been extended by a further twenty-two years to include the period to 2008.

Talis Aspire at Aberystwyth: delivering reading lists online to support learning and teaching

Other universities have been discovering the benefits of the Talis Aspire online reading list service

• Staff at the University of Liverpool talk about their experiences of using Talis Aspire in this video
• In this video students at Nottingham Trent University give their first impressions of Talis Aspire

More news on the implementation of Talis Aspire at Aberystwyth

• Formal introduction will take place at the AU Teaching & Learning Conference September 16th-18th; why not come along to one of the conference workshops and give Talis Aspire try
• Training for academic and administrative staff will be available in Hugh Owen and Thomas Parry libraries during October and November, or by arrangement at a place and time convenient to you
• First reading lists to be entered in October/November for 2nd Semester modules 2014/2015 to allow time to purchase any items not in stock in the libraries or electronically

Any changes to procedures will be added to the existing Reading list web page. Please feel free to contact the subject librarians with any questions you have: acastaff@aber.ac.uk

Meet your Academic Services Librarian #12

I’m Simon French and I’m the Library Graduate Trainee for the 2014/2015 session. The photograph is of me on a literary pilgrimage to Shakespeare and Company in Paris. As you can see, even when I’m on holiday I don’t want to stray too far from the books!
Books have always played a major part in my life. One of my earliest memories as a child was joining my local library. The first time I went in, I couldn’t believe my luck. I could have any three books that I wanted. Free! This was too good an opportunity to miss. Obviously I was going to make it worth my while and so I picked the three largest books I could find.  After nearly forty years my memory of that day is a bit sketchy but I distinctly remember that one of the books was called something like ‘Warplanes of the Third Reich’. It was a huge book, bound in blue cloth filled with technical diagrams and details along with silhouettes of the planes in question. I could barely lift it and quite what use it would have been to a small boy in 1970s rural Herefordshire is anyone’s guess, but I didn’t care. It was the size of the thing that mattered.

Yet my working life did not begin in a very bookish fashion. I started out selling polythene bags for a living but the excitement of that soon waned. I stuck it out for five years and then I threw in the thrills of the bag factory to go and pursue my first love – books. I studied for my BA and MA in English Literature at the University of the West of England in Bristol. I then got a job researching and cataloguing manuscripts and rare books for an antiquarian bookseller. Some six years later I struck out on my own path and for ten more years I bought and sold books for a living.

Aberystwyth University LibTeachMeet

The Information Literacy site features a report on the stimulating LibTeachMeet event that took place at Aberystwyth University earlier this month. Ffion Bell, our graduate trainee, bid for the funding and organised the event during her placement in Academic Services. Find out more about what went on...

Coming soon! A new AU reading list service supported by Talis Aspire

Talis Aspire is a reading list system designed to create accurately referenced, deep-linked resource lists available in Blackboard modules and other online locations.
Please take a look at this short video.
Planning for implementation is underway but some key milestones are as follows:

• Implementation: July
• Configuration and testing: August/September
• Training for academic and administrative staff: October
• First reading lists to be entered in October/November for 2nd Semester modules 2014/2015 to allow time to purchase any items not in stock in the libraries or electronically
• ARMS to remain available for editing until mid-November
• Existing users of ARMS will be advised that it won’t be possible to export their lists into Aspire, however they will be prioritised for training and assistance with using Aspire

There will be regular announcements to track project progress, and changes to procedures will be added to the existing Reading list web page.We look forward to showing you the new system as soon as we can! Please feel free to contact the subject librarians with any questions you have: acastaff@aber.ac.uk