*NEW* Research Data Management event - book now

UK Data Archive: Research Data Management

Effective Research Data Management throughout the lifetime of a research project is increasing in importance as Research Councils and other funding bodies now require researchers to make publically funded research data openly and freely available where possible.  This event will look at managing your research data, which a focus on data sharing. 

The UK Data Archive is funded by ESRC and all ESRC funded researchers are expected to deposit their data in the UK Data Archive, so this event will be particularly relevant to ESRC funded researchers, but all researchers at Aston University are welcome. 

This workshop will be facilitated by Veerle Van den Eynden, Producer Relations & Research Data Manager at the UK Data Archive.

When: Thursday 13 August, 10am - 4pm

Where:  Library 2nd Floor Workshop A

Lunch will be provided

Book your place: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/uk-data-archive-research-data-management-tickets-17780934253

If you can't attend but would like to view an Aston Replay capture of this event, please also follow the link above to register.

Library Go Green Team win an award

we hope you will join us in congratulating the Library Go Green Team who received their Aston Excellence Award last week. Here are some of the achievements over the last year:

• Monthly challenges: collecting items to send to charity e.g. spectacles, unwanted jewellery, Christmas cards and stamps, unwanted Christmas gifts

• Involved very actively in Go Green Week including maintaing a book display, recycling game, members of staff attended the Go Green quiz night 

•  Weekly Go Green input into LS bulletin

• Took part in planting event and plants given “homes” by Library staff 

•  Book Swap –  with remainder offered for free holiday reading

•  Rescued academic books - sold at a discount price to students 

• Recycle unwanted library books by sending them to charity

•  Lighting levels in the library are checked to ensure that the lowest comfortable levels were set and that the lights time out periods were the most efficient they could be.

•  Recycling whiteboard and other pens (in addition to the monthly challenge)

•  Leaflets and posters now reduced  to a minimum and all library information where possible is in electronic form including requests for journals

•  Reduced our paper usage; redesigning forms, reusing forms and wherever possible online versions of forms used.

Research Data Management in 30 minutes

You may have seen the publicity and / or attended one of the training workshops on Research Data Management run by Georgina Hardy (Research Data Management Specialist) and Paul Jones (Research Information Manager). 

The Library is pleased to announce that Georgina will be running a 30 minute presentation on Research Data Management in the Library workshop on Wednesday 29th July, 13:00 in L215.  This is the 5th seminar in our series of Research Bites and normally follows a pattern of a presentation followed by plenty of time for discussion, comment or questions in the second half.

If you are interested in finding our more about Research Data Management, the Aston RDM policy and the things you will have to do for funder compliance please book on now.

Research Data Management: responsibilities, practice and support
Wednesday 29th July, 13:00-14:00
Library Building, 2nd floor - L215

The full Research Bite programme is available at http://www.aston.ac.uk/researchbites  

Requests for journal stock from Store

One of the rolling stacks in our journal store is broken which means that any journal titles kept at store numbers between S2 and S498 are currently unavailable. We're working to get this fixed as soon as possible, but there will be a delay in retrieval of this material for the time being. Material at store numbers S499 onwards are still available as normal.

Have you booked your place on the Research Bite seminars?

Research Bites 2015

The Library is two weeks in to the Research Bites series and the sessions  are going well.  Attendees have visited us from across the University including PhD Students, Teaching Fellows and Researchers. Research Bites are aimed at PhD and Early Career Researchers but everyone can find something useful in the programme.   A full programme is available from the Library website and reminders are posted in Aston Aspects every week. 

So far we have looked at Refined Literature Searching focussing on the search facilities available in the key research databases in the University including Proquest, Scopus and Web of Science.   Highlights include looking at improving recall and precision of searches, the use of controlled vocabulary, proximity searching and cited reference searching.  The attendees talked a little about their experiences and the group tried to resolve some of the problems they had encountered.  The discussions are not recorded but the presentation is available to listen and view now 

The second Research Bite looked at finding and using Grey Literature.  The focus was on the benefits and challenges you face when using this type of literature in research.  This was the first time that we covered this topic in our programme.  Although, the seminar did have fewer attendees and the discussion wasn't as vibrant it has caused us to think about incorporating the information in to our web LibGuides.   The presentation is available to listen and view now.

We look forward to seeing you at our next Research Bite on Wednesday which will look at EndNote and how you can use this software to find, collate and organise your references for your PhD or research paper and insert them automatically using Cite while you Write.

If you have comments about the programme or suggestions for seminars in the future please comment below.