Off-campus access to EBSCOhost products unavailable

Dear Staff and Students,

We are experiencing technical difficulties with off-campus access to EBSCOhost products which include:

Business Source Premier
Econlit
Education Research Complete
SocIndex

We are working with EBSCO to resolve the problem but in the meantime if you do need to access these databases while using the University wireless network or an off-campus PC please go through the University proxy server

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.