Free access to over 170 million company records

The data has previously been available to the public but at a cost.  This week the Beta version has been released to allow free searching and viewing of the 170 million records available.  The data includes financial accounts, company filings, past and current director details.

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/

2015 Aber LibTeachMeet. Finding Time for the Past: Special Collections in the Internet Age.

The 2015 Aber LibTeachMeet held at the Hugh Owen Library on the 3rd June, was a great success. For full details of the event, please visit:  https://aberlibteachmeet.wordpress.com/2015/06/10/we-found-time-for-the-past/

Tuesday 30th June: Aspire Reading Lists deadline for Semester 1

Add your reading lists to Aspire for modules being taught in Semester 1 (or being taught both semesters) by June 30th to ensure there is sufficient time to buy books and digitise materials for Blackboard for the new academic year. 

Please contact your subject librarian or the Academic Services team acastaff@aber.ac.uk 01970621896 if you would like some one-to-one help to begin adding your lists to Aspire. Find self-paced training materials  here (help sheets, videos, a presentation and FAQs).

If you have already added your lists, use this checklist to update them ready for teaching and library resourcing.

Wellcome Trust / Research Information Network Report on Scholarship and Review

Responding to academic concerns regarding the effectiveness of peer review for papers published in journals, the Wellcome Trust commissioned the Research Information Network (RIN) (http://www.rin.ac.uk/) to investigate possible strategies to improve the peer review system in the light of:

i) the availability of new technologies in e-journals and
ii) the large number of new entrants to academic journal publishing, particularly in the area of open access publishing.  

The resulting Wellcome Trust / RIN report was published in March 2015 - http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtp059003.pdf

The report envisages the following developments:

• Innovations such as post-publication peer review and open peer-reviewing will be slow to take off as the academic cultures supporting the current pre-publication peer review system are very powerful
• Whilst it would be good for all stages of the peer review process to become more open, a distinction needs to be made between revealing reviewers’ identities and revealing the actual content of their reviews
• More interaction is needed between editors, reviewers and authors, both before and after publication
• Article-level metrics (altmetrics), which measure the numbers of comments, ratings, bookmarks and news coverage which papers receive on the web and in social media, are becoming increasingly important as alternative methods of assessing public engagement
• Some form of scholarly credit needs to be introduced to recognise the contribution of peer reviewers, as shown by the development of such systems as Peerage of Science (https://www.peerageofscience.org/) and Publons (https://publons.com/) .  This recognition should be in the form of attribution, there being currently little academic enthusiasm for a system of monetary rewards 
• Distinction needs to be made between peer review to determine the academic soundness of a paper and that to determine whether or not a paper fits the scope and ambition of the journal to which it has been submitted. Publishers are now starting to set up “cascade systems” so as to avoid reviewing the same paper more than once.

Aspire Reading Lists goes live in AberLearn Blackboard!

You’ve done all the hard work, now here’s the pay-off. All those reading lists that you have published in Aspire can now be made available to your students in AberLearn Blackboard! How? Visit the module, uncheck the tick box next to the Aspire Reading List link in the left-hand menu and your list will be live.

So what will the students see? Blackboard displays an at-a-glance view of the reading list for that module. Not only that, but there is a traffic-light system that shows current availability in the library. Green means the item is on the shelf, red means it’s out on loan.



Is that all?! Absolutely not: Aspire offers features to display a range of resources such as week-by-week readings and YouTube videos.

And if that was not enough, there’s even the facility for the students themselves to interact with the reading list. By signing into Aspire they can add study notes and a read status for any item on their list. It all sounds good, doesn’t it; how did we manage without it?

Are you ready to join in and get your reading list on to Aspire? There’s no time like the present. If you need help or if you have any queries, suggestions or feedback, or would like to arrange some one-to-one training, please contact the Academic Services Librarians at acastaff@aber.ac.uk or on extension 1896.

Early law books in Aberystwyth University Library - trial of Henry Sacheverell and a volume of Horace owned and annotated by him

New display in Thomas Parry Library

A post by Lillian Stevenson, Academic Services Manager and Law Librarian based on information supplied by Bill Hines

Henry Sacheverell (1674-1724)
Sacheverell was a clergyman and politician who helped to bring the downfall of the Whig government with a sermon preached in St Paul’s Cathedral in November 1709. His trial was a major event. Aberystwyth University Library holds extensive accounts of the proceedings, along with a volume of Horace which was owned and annotated by Sacheverell while he was a student at Oxford in the 1690s.

Sacheverell asked that all his papers and books be destroyed after his death so few now remain and we are lucky to hold a volume which was actually in his ownership. This is a copy of Horace published by Swalle in 1690, with significant annotation in Sacheverell’s hand. Sacheverell’s 1709 sermon in St. Paul’s Cathedral – “On the perils of false brethren” led to his trial for sedition and we hold several reports of the case – including that in the State Trials series. The trial helped to bring down the Whig government of the day and provoked riots in London and even in Powys, Wales.  Simon Harcourt, one time Attorney General and Lord Chancellor, acted as counsel for Sacheverell until his election as MP for Cardigan. By chance we also hold books belonging to two bishops who were involved with Sacheverell. Henry Compton, Bishop of London, was a prominent supporter. Compton had earlier signed the letter inviting the future William III to come over to England and later crowned him – so has some significance in the development of our current UK constitutional settlement. William Talbot, then Bishop of Oxford , was one of those supporting the impeachment of Sacheverell when the matter was discussed in the House of Lords in March 1710.