NEW DATABASE: IBISWorld Update

IBISWorld is one of the UK's richest source of business and industry information. IBISWorld Industry Reports are a useful tool to help write business plans, marketing plans, understand business strategy and to understand supply chain. This database provides independent, accurate, comprehensive, and current research on 100s of Industries in the UK, USA, Australia, China and Global Industry, including statistics, analysis and forecasts.

You can access IBISWorld through the Aston e-Library > Log in > Find Resource > Locate and type in IBISWorld.

Aston University Library has now extended trial access until the end of August 2011. If you use IBISWorld we would welcome your feedback on the product. Please send feedback to library@aston.ac.uk

Book loans over the Easter vacation

Books will continue to be loaned for the normal seven day, one day or long loan period during the Easter vacation. They will need to be renewed online: https://library.aston.ac.uk/patroninfo or returned when due.

(No books will be due for return during the library closed period Friday, 22nd April to Tuesday, 26th April inclusive or between Friday, 29th April to Monday, 2nd May inclusive.)

Any book which cannot be renewed due to a reservation will need to be returned by post if necessary. Fines will be charged for late return.

Dawsonera downtime

The e-book platform Dawsonera will unavailable between 5-6 on Thursday 31st March due to essential work to make improvements to the service.

Anonymous Comment

Please could the person who left the anonymous comment about a security guard contact us at library@aston.ac.uk with more details so that we can follow up your query?

Excellent Customer Service

LIS prides itself on its customer service and has just increased its score from 87% to 95% in an assessment for Customer Service Excellence awarded by the Cabinet Office. The assessor measures 57 standards for customer service, based on an evidential submission, observation of practice, and interviews with students, LIS staff and colleagues from around the University. He was amazed at the difference made by the refurbishment , and said that feedback from students about both the service and the refurbishment was overwhelmingly positive. The question he was asked most often was “When is the rest of the Library going to be done?”

Problem linking to e-journals via Find it @ Aston

**UPDATE** This issue has now been resolved and you should be able to search the e-Library and link through to e-journals again with no problems.

We're currently experiencing problems with the software that links us through to e-journals. The suppliers are working on a fix for this as a matter of urgency but in the meantime you can take the following steps to get round this:

• If you want to do a search for journal articles on a particular topic, use the Aston e-Library "Find Resource" section to link through to subject specific full text databases and perform your searches there.
• If you have a citation for a specific e-journal article and need to access the fulltext, search Google Scholar to find out where the e-journal is available and try to access the fulltext from there.

Apologies for the inconvenience this will cause. This post will be updated as soon as the problem is fixed.

Library - Invitation to Focus Group Discussion

Dear Students,

Tell us what you think!

Library & Information Services would like to invite you to a focus group discussion in the Library to ensure your views contribute to our programme of continuous improvement.

If you would like to help and you are free from:
12:30 to 2:00pm on Tuesday 22 March (Undergraduates)
12:30 to 2:00pm on Wednesday 23 March (Postgraduates)

then please email library@aston.ac.uk to book a place. We will provide you with some light refreshments and an online book voucher.

Please include the following information with your reply:
1. Your name
2. Course of study
3. Year of study
4. Brief information about why you would like to be involved in the focus group

Once you have contacted us, we will confirm your booking via email by Monday 21st March.

We will allocate places on a first-come, first-served basis ensuring at the same time, that students from different courses of study, across different year groups, are all represented as much as possible. Please remember that your views are valuable to us in developing services that meet your needs and the needs of students at Aston in the coming years.

We look forward to hearing from you.

library@aston.ac.uk

Datastream Question & Answer sessions

Dear Students,

Do you use the financial numerical database Datastream? Would you like further help extracting data? Thomson Reuters are offering Question and Answer sessions for students using the Datastream database. If you are having problems extracting data and would like advice please feel free to sign up for one of the Q&A sessions:

• Client trainers from Thomson Reuters will be holding online Q&A sessions to answer your questions regarding data on DataStream
  
• No need to have the product in front of you, just the question that you want answering · No need to join a conference call, they will use Adobe chat… however, if you really want to talk to a trainer they will provide a number to call
  
• To sign up email training.uki@thomsonreuters.com stating the date, time and product session that you would like to attend

Dates and Times are: 9th March 3:00pm and 23rd March 10:00am

Kind Regards
Nicola Dennis
Business Information Specialist

24/6 Library Opening Hours Sunday, 6th March - Friday, 25th March

During the postgraduate examination period, the Library will be open for 24 hours, 6 days a week.
Sunday, 6 March 2011 to 10:00pm on Friday, 25th March 2011.
The Library will close at 6:00pm on Saturdays and reopen at 11:00am on Sundays

For full details of the 24 hour opening times, please see our opening hours web pages.

If you have any queries or comments about this, please add them below.

Struggling to use Datastream?

Try the Thomson Reuters Knowledge Network which provides training materials for all Thomson Reuters products. Aston University subscribes to Datastream and those training materials are available at https://customers.reuters.com/trainingknowledgenetwork/Datastream/Index.html

The on-demand e-tutorials require you to sign up for a free account with Thomson Reuters Customer Zone, but the video tutorials can be viewed online by anyone.

For Datastream beginners I would recommend viewing:

Retrieving and Analyzing Data in Excel
Finding Codes with Navigator

Nicola Dennis
Business Information Specialist

Library fines donated to RAGWEEK charities

All Library fines paid this week and next week (Sunday 27 February to Saturday 12 March inclusive) will be donated to Aston Student Guild RAGWEEK charities.

E-book access troubleshooting

Do you often have problems accessing e-books using the Internet Explorer browser?
Do you constantly get error messages, or keep trying to log in but never actually get to the e-book?

In order to get round this you can either use a different browser such as Mozilla Firefox or you can change your settings in Internet Explorer:

• click on Tools in your internet browser
• select Internet Options
• select the Privacy tab and move the settings down to "low"

However, if you don’t want to lower the security settings in your browser for all sites, you can do this on a case-by-case basis in the following way:

• click on Tools in your internet browser
• select Internet Options
• select the Privacy tab
• click on Sites and then enter the last part of the URL (see below) for each e-book platform you are having problems with and select Allow:
  
  dawsonera.com
  ebrary.com
  myilibrary.com
  safaribooksonline.com

If you continue to have problems with e-books, please comment on this post or email library@aston.ac.uk.

Free trial to complete Palgrave Macmillan Journals content

Palgrave are offering full-text access to their complete collection of e-journals throughout March. Click here to take advantage of this trial before the end of the month.