Welcome to all new students - Like Your Library Live Invitation

We look forward to seeing you at your "Like Your Library Live" session.

All sessions take place in the Main Building in room G8 over the next two weeks. 
Please check your timetable on MAP for details.

• Meet your Information Specialist
• Find out about Library services
• Participate in demos of self-service facilities
• Pick up a goody bag with essential information

There are prizes to be won including an iPAD, John Smith's book tokens and vouchers for the Bullring shopping centre.

Like us on Facebook and enter a prize draw for £100 Waterstones vouchers.

See you there!

28th and 29th of September is moving in weekend

This weekend, the University is expecting a couple of thousand people on campus.  New students will be moving in to the campus accommodation and their siblings and parents will be arriving to help . Library & Information Services would like to let you know that the building will be open from 8.30am on Saturday and 12.00pm on Sunday.

Our entrance gates will be left open so that new students and their parents can come in to the Library,  use the facilities on the Ground Floor and relax in Cafe Libro. 

We hope you have a good weekend.

British Library - Doctoral Open Days

Have you just started your PhD?

The British Library are offering an opportunity to access their unique research collections. From newspapers to maps, datasets to manuscripts, ship logs to websites, their collections cover every format and language and span the last 3000 years.

Learn about the different collections, find out how to access them, meet the expert staff and other researchers in your field.  The Open Days are aimed at PhD students new to the British Library.  Each Open Day is linked to a specific subject area and there is a small attendance fee of £5. 

You can find out more via the Open Day website

Wiley downtime: 28th September

Wiley Online Library (including the Cochrane Library) will be down for approximately 4 hours between 09:00 EDT and 14:00 EDT on Saturday 28th September while they make improvements to their site.

Library Refurbishment, Phase 2 - Decorators are now in!

As you can see from the photographs, taken by our contractors Overbury, decorating has begun! To maintain the colour theme throughout the library, the 2nd and 3rd floors will also have feature walls in the now familiar orange, red and pink. 

Both floors will have new grey carpet which we hope will cope with the extensive footfall expected over the years.

To see the latest photographs of the study rooms on floor 2, the flexible teaching spaces and the roof plantroom ready for action, please view the Aston University Library Flickr account

Kind Regards
Library Photography Team
Kerstin, Nicola and Val

Have you visited Birmingham's £189 million pound Library yet?

Library of Birmingham

We would love to hear what you think of the new Birmingham Central Library?  Post us a comment or send us a tweet @AstonLIS

View Oliver Wainwright's article in the Guardian at http://gu.com/p/3tbdc or check out the Birmingham Mail coverage via their website

Library Refurbishment, Phase 2 - Changes to ventilation

It has been a busy week for the refurbishment project.  The scaffolding has been taken down at the back of the Library and the main Library Office window is now free of scaffold poles and planks of wood.  The builders have been nothing but professional whilst visible from the office window.

The next stage of the building work is to begin adding the cavity wall insulation and to reconfigure the duct work in the ground floor plantroom.  More duct pipes have been arriving and the cradles for the cavity wall insulation have been installed at the side of the Library Building.

The work does mean that the ventilation will be turned off tomorrow until 5:00pm on Monday 16th September.  This should not effect the environment in the Library Building as the air conditioning will continue to work.  However, if you do feel you would like to study elsewhere please note that there are additional study facilities available 

MB561, 563 and 565 (60 spaces); MB606 (80 spaces); SW309 (30 spaces); NW109 (60 spaces); MBG8 (40 spaces) and the MB Sky Lift Lobbies (60 spaces).

The MB PG suite, i.e. MB225, 227, 229, 231, 234 and 246 (200 spaces), is available to postgraduates for study during the evenings and weekends.

 

If you have any queries or comments about the refurbishment please contact the Library via library@aston.ac.uk 

 

New refurbishment photographs are available via the Library Flickr account 

A win for the Information Services Team

Congratulations to Clare Langman, one of our Information Specialists in the Information Services Team, who has won access to Industrial Analysis data worth £5,000 until 31st March 2014 for Aston University staff and students.

The Library subscribes to a market analysis database called Passport which is supplied by Euromonitor.  Clare attended a webinar on new developments within this market analysis database.  At the end of the webinar, Clare answered all the quiz questions correctly and was offered the prize to the additional Industrial Analysis data by our academic account manager Ruth Bysshe.

• To read more about the additional Passport Industrials data please view Euromonitor's publicity
• To access the additional Passport Industrials data please view our Business & Management LibGuide 
• Choose the Databases tab and then Market Research from the menu
• Choose Passport
• Once you have logged in, choose Industries 
• The Industrials module is located in the far right column.

The Business Information Specialists, Nicola and Lydia would like to thank

• Clare for this addition to the Library's portfolio of databases
  
•   for providing the prize

Library System - now up and running

The Library System upgrade was successful.  you should now be able to

• Search Library SmartSearch to find books and journal articles and see whether items in the library are available for loan or not. 
• Access your Library Record to renew books, pay fines and so on. 
• Borrow a Laptop from either the Help Desk or the self-service laptop cabinets. 
• Issue or return books in the library, using the self-service machines. 

Catch up on Research Bites 2013

Research Bites 2013 was a success!  The short, informal seminars held on Wednesdays throughout July and August featured topics relevant to researchers at all levels. Every seminar was captured by Aston Replay and they are all now available to watch online. 

Topics for this year's seminars included:

• Fine-tune your literature searches
• Measuring Research Impact: yours and others’
• Using Endnote to organise your references
• What can Open Access publishing do for you? 
• Managing your Research Data 

You can find more details about the topics and a link to the Aston Replay recording for each in the full programme on the Research Bites 2013 webpage.
If you would like to download the PowerPoint slides for any of the topics, you can also access the Aston Replay recordings, PowerPoint slides and further information via Library Matters on Blackboard > Info for Research > Research Bites 2013.

If you missed your opportunity to recieve a copy of vitae's publication, The informed researcher: Because interacting with information is at the very heart of your research, which features a self-assessment tool for information literacy and maps these skills against the Researcher Development Framework, you can download a copy instead.

The Library will be closed on Saturday 7 September

The Library will be closed on Saturday 7 September for electrical work associated with the refurbishment of the second and third floors.

The Library will be open on Sunday 8 September from 12.00pm to 5.00pm as usual.

Alternative study spaces are available as follows:

MB561, 563 and 565 (60 spaces); MB606 (80 spaces); SW309 (30 spaces); NW109 (60 spaces); MBG8 (40 spaces) and the MB Sky Lift Lobbies (60 spaces).

The MB PG suite, i.e. MB225, 227, 229, 231, 234 and 246 (200 spaces), is available to postgraduates for study during the evenings and weekends.

If you have any queries about this closure, or about any other implications of the refurbishment, please email library@aston.ac.uk.

Westlaw - search enhancements

Throughout 2013 Westlaw UK has made a number of enhancements to the database  search functionality including suggested terms and relevancy ranking. The latest enhancement to Westlaw UK search is the introduction of filtering to search results.

The new search filtering enhancement will let you refine results, saving time and effort. Filtering is applied across all of Westlaw UK (excluding books and EU),

• Filtering over whole results set (not limited to 4,000)
• Further enhances ease of searching Westlaw UK
• Detailed indexing allows filtering by topic, date, jurisdiction, content type, court and status
• Ability to filter across all possible results and not just the capped list for display
• Ability to Print, Download, E-mail and Folder from filtered results
• Ability to save the filtered results for alerting
• Ability to save the filtered results for RSS
• Ability to build links to the filtered results

For more information view their newsletter or download the Westlaw UK Search Guide

The Library will be closed on Saturday 7 September

The Library will be closed on Saturday 7 September for electrical work associated with the refurbishment of the second and third floors.

The Library will be open on Sunday 8 September from 12:00 to 17:00 as usual.

Alternative study spaces are available as follows:
MB561, 563 and 565 (60 spaces); MB606 (80 spaces); SW309 (30 spaces); NW109 (60 spaces); MBG8 (40 spaces) and the MB Sky Lift Lobbies (60 spaces).

The MB PG suite, i.e. MB225, 227, 229, 231, 234 and 246 (200 spaces), is available to postgraduates for study during the evenings and weekends.

If you have any queries about this closure, or about any other implications of the refurbishment, please email library@aston.ac.uk.