Research & Reference
RSC-Northwest Team curation Dec 6
UK’s open access full-text search engine to aid research
Open access research is now more accessible as JISC has developed a new search engine to help academics, students and the general public navigate papers held in the UK’s open access repositories. JISC has funded the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) to create an innovative new search facility which searches not just the abstract but the full text of the article. When researchers use current systems like Google Scholar to search academic papers they can find themselves denied access to the full article, particularly when subscription fees are required. They also typically have to search across a number of open access repositories or use searches that harvest data from different sources. But now, using the COnnecting REpositories tool or CORE, people can search the full text of items held in 142 approved Open Access repositories. “UK repositories contain a wealth of high quality research papers.
Seamlessly Move Your Browser Tabs Between Computers Using The Surfon Plugin
Save your tabs in one browser; open them in another. Surfon aims to make jumping between different browsers and devices easier, and it works. If you use more than one computer, and frequently open way too many tabs , you’ve run into this problem before. You want to switch computers, but also want to move browser tabs with you. Surfon makes this not only possible, but simple, allowing you to save and restore your open tabs in just a couple of clicks.Search EBooks - An eBook Search Engine
The web is full of ebooks, you can see mine here , but finding them isn't always easy. You can search by file type on Google or visit any number of document hosting services like Issuu, but even then you might be missing something good. Search EBooks is a service dedicated to helping you find free ebooks. When you find an ebook on Search EBooks you can view a preview of it, download, or grab an embed code without ever leaving the search results page. Applications for Education Many useful how-to manuals are published as ebooks.
Paper vs digital: Why you can’t flog a dead encyclopaedia
Takeaway: We’re living through the closing chapter of paper and the printed word - and we shouldn’t mourn their passing. The cost of online access to everything is zero compared with the expense of limited access to paper. Photo: Shutterstock
New Video: Plagiarism Explained by Common Craft
Today we’re publishing a new video: Plagiarism Explained by Common Craft One of our most suggested titles, this video is aimed at educators who are on the front lines of helping students of all ages understand and avoid plagiarism. In researching this video it became clear that there are two types of plagiarism - intentional and unintentional. While we cover intentional plagiarism, we also highlight the situation where a person has positive intentions, but lacks information about what constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it. This video is currently available to Common Craft members with captions in English. <p style="text-align:right;color:#A8A8A8"></p>
LSIS inherits the NLN materials
Published: 22 July 2011 We are pleased to announce that the NLN materials, a huge range of well-respected online teaching and learning resources, have been transferred to LSIS this week. Originally funded by the Skills Funding Agency, the materials represent one of the most substantial and wide-ranging collections of e-learning materials in the UK.
EIFL-sponsored project nominated for prestigious UN award According to the World Health Organization, across the world, there are 285 million visually impaired persons (VIP); 90% of them are living in developing countries. The librarians at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) wanted to better serve the students with visual impairments at their university. In collaboration with the EIFL-FOSS programme, they formed a partnership with UZ’s Disability Resource Centre (DRC) to implement real solutions resulting in increased access to online resources for the UZ’s students with disabilities. Their success was recognized by the Zimbabwe Ministry of Public Affairs, and the project has been nominated for a UN award.
Libraries lead the way providing tools for visually impaired students
A new community-owned content service for UK HE and FE institutions JISC Collections, the membership organisation that supports the provision of digital content for education and research in the UK, is formally launching a new service to consolidate and host a broad range of content including journal archives, historic books and multimedia items. The JISC eCollections service has been funded by JISC, to protect and preserve content investments made by JISC Collections on behalf of UK higher and further education institutions. The service comprises three platforms, developed in partnership with EDINA (JISC MediaHub) and Mimas (JISC Journal Archives and JISC Historic Books). Together they are intended to provide a sustainable, value for money alternative to accessing licensed content on publisher platforms. Each platform contains a number of resources to which JISC Collections has previously negotiated long-term licences, along with some content that has never before been available online:
JISC Collections - The trusted experts in negotiating, procuring, and licensing digital content for libraries
What does the future hold for our university libraries? Are they obsolete or are they essential? The library has long been seen by many as a very traditional, conservative institution, and is often portrayed as a place where rows upon rows of antiquated book shelves slowly gather dust. Yet a visit to the university library today will reveal a substantial investment in technology to streamline research and provide users with a more seamless and rewarding experience.
Library 2.0
Poll Results: What Technologies will impact libraries in 2-5 years?
March 5th, 2012 by Ellyssa Kroski There were an amazing 395 responses to last week’s poll question: Which new technology(ies) do you think will have the most impact on libraries over the next 2-5 years? e-Books, mobile, and cloud computing technologies dominated the responses.Amazon encourages multiple purchase of their Kindles for use in education, however at present this does not extend to multiple use of digital content bought from the Kindle store. The digital content may be downloaded for personal use only which would not include the loan of individual items to multiple users. Our FAQ on Copyright issues in lending Kindles for more detail on this. There is material which it may be possible to use and lend freely such as:
How can we legally lend digital content to our students via a Kindle? > JISC Legal > ManageContent
The British Library's newspaper archive, previously kept in decent obscurity in north London, is now available to browse online. Photograph: Jack Sullivan/Alamy As the Leveson inquiry reveals fresh horrors about press behaviour every day, the British Library 's archive of early newspapers , which has gone online , shows there is nothing new under the Sun – or, perhaps, in it. More than 4m pages, drawn mainly from 19th-century regional newspapers, previously kept in decent obscurity at the library's newspaper archive in Colindale, north London , will now be available for historians and family researchers to browse for a small fee, or free if they visit the central library in King's Cross. All human life, not to say all the news fit to print, is certainly there, albeit written up in florid Victorian prose – great events, horrible murders reported in exhaustive detail, celebrity gossip, as well as the occasional intrusion into private grief.