New! Access to Sage Research Methods until end of March.

Aston staff and students now have access to a temporary trial of Sage Research Methods until the end of March 2013.

Sage Research Methods is a research methods tool created to help researchers, faculty and students with their research projects. It links over 100,000 pages book, journal and reference content with advanced search and discovery tools. Researchers can explore methods concepts to help them design research projects, understand particular methods or identify a new method, conduct their research, and write up their findings. The database contains content from more than 640 books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and handbooks, the entire “Little Green Book,” and Little Blue Book” series, two Major Works collating a selection of journal articles, and newly commissioned videos. To access the Help Page, please click here.  For Tips and Tutorials, please click here. 

If you would like to provide feedback on this resource, please email library@aston.ac.uk or add your comments to this blog post.

Be Alert to Zetoc Alerts!

Did you know that in 2012, Zetoc sent out 2,081,058 Alerts?

Zetoc Alerts offer a convenient way to stay up-to-date in your subject area and can save you time without compromising your knowledge of your subject area. 

There are two main ways that Zetoc Alerts can help you:

• Receive e-mails listing the tables of contents of new issues of key journals you have identified in your subject area
• Receive e-mails when new journal articles are published which satisfy your author or title keyword search criteria

If you would like further advice on using Zetoc Alerts, or any of our other alerting services, please ask at the Help Desk or contact your Information Specialist.

You can use the FollowMe system to print from your own laptop or home computer

ISA have launched a trial Internet printing service for the FollowMe system.

This will allow you to print from your own laptop or home computer and will operate if you are on campus, in residences or even while working from a café in town!

For more information including installation instructions see:
http://www1.aston.ac.uk/ict/studentguide/printing/internetprinting/.

Maintenance on the Self Service Laptop system - 25/01/2013

Lapsafe, who supply the Library with their self service laptop system will be running essential maintenance on the system at 22:00 on 25th January 2013.  This may mean that the service is unavailable between 22:00 and 22:30 on 25th January while the work is carried out.

If you have trouble returning your laptop during this period please return them to staff at the Welcome Desk.  You will still need to show your card to staff when handing in the laptop.  If you have any queries please contact us on library@aston.ac.uk

The new database Business Source Complete - an update

The new database Business Source Complete (BSC) from EBSCO is the upgraded version of Business Source Premier (BSP) - it contains all the peer-reviewed journal & trade magazine titles from before, plus hundreds of new titles as well as a vast range of other resources. As such, we've now decided to show the links to just BSC on all the Library webpages, A-Z databases list & various LibGuides in place of BSP.

If you are a student wanting business information, we recommend that you use the Enhanced Business Searching Interface (BSI). BSI is EBSCO's highly focused user interface created especially for business researchers. It provides an easy way to both browse and search for country economic data, company profiles, industry market trends or potential, and market research. Full-text coverage in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics is covered.

We hope you gain lots of use from the new BSC database - happy searching & researching!

Invitation - Library focus group on Library fines and reservations

Dear students

Do you have views on Library fines and the reservations system?
We would like to invite people who can attend a Focus group on:

• Wednesday 23 January 5:00pm or
• Thursday 24 January 4:00pm

We will reward you with tokens to the value of £40 for 1.5 hours of your time.

Please email a.e.brady@aston.ac.uk asap if you would like to attend so that we can reserve a place for you.

Thank you
Angela Brady
LIS
 

Online resources logging in system unavailable morning of Monday 21st Jan

**This upgrade has now been rescheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday 22nd January) morning.**
Due to an essential upgrade, the Open Athens authentication system will be unavailable on Monday 21st January from 9.30 - 11.30. This means that you will be unable to log into online journals and databases for this period.