Congratulations to all graduating students

Congratulations to all graduating students. Before you leave please can you return all your library books and pay off any outstanding fines.

Best regards and best of luck for the future from LIS

Library Team

New Database: Scopus

Aston staff and students now have access to the bibliographic database Scopus.

Scopus is the world's largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track analyze and visualize research.

You can access Scopus here: http://www.scopus.com/scopus/home.url. Look out for the Find it Aston icon in your results list to check on full-text availability.

Library Opening Hours - changes this weekend due to demolition works to the towers

The Library will close at 18:00 on Saturday, 7 May.
The Library will be closed all day on Sunday, 8 May.
The Library will re-open at 08:00 on Monday, 9 May.

Perfect Information - free trial is ending 1st June

Dear Library users,

The free trial to Perfect Information is ending 1st June 2011. If you have any comments about this service please email feedback to: library@aston.ac.uk

PI Navigator is a financial and capital markets database providing access to over 15 million global company filings including annual reports, Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), equity transactional documents (including Initial Public Offerings) and bond prospectuses. PI Navigator surfaces the value of the data buried within financial documents, providing the ability to significantly reduce the time taken when modelling company financials.

To research students and researchers

Pat Gannon-Leary of Bede Research & Consultancy is writing a brief guide provisionally entitled The Informed Researcher, commissioned by the RIN in close collaboration with Vitae and SCONUL, and aimed at researchers such as yourself.

As part of this work, Pat is trying to find out what type of information on this topic would be particularly useful for researchers.

SCONUL has produced a model known as the 7 Pillars of Information Literacy. These are as follows:-

1. Identify (a personal need for information)
2. Scope (assess current knowledge and identify gaps)
3. Plan (construct strategies for locating information and data)
4. Gather (locate and access information and data needed)
5. Evaluate (review research process and compare and evaluate information and data)
6. Manage (organise information professionally and ethically)
7. Present (apply knowledge gained; presenting results, synthesising new and old information and data to create new knowledge and disseminating it in various ways)

For more details click here.

You probably recognise these pillars in your own work. What Pat would like you to do, if you would be so kind, is just to respond to the following statement:-

One aspect of the 7 pillars which I consider most important for me and about which I would like to know more is...

Please respond directly to Pat by e-mail with as much or as little text in response to the statement. If there is more than one aspect, feel free to write at length.

Thanks in anticipation for your help in developing the guide. It should prove useful for researchers when it is published.

Free access to Routledge Education Journals throughout April

Throughout April you can enjoy free online access to over 200 Routledge Education journals. A wide range of subjects are covered in this promotion including Curriculum Studies, Education Research, Early Years Education, Higher Education, Teacher Education, Educational Psychology, History of Education and more. From 1st April until 30th April, you can benefit from high quality research from the latest journal issues as well as the entire archive content back to 1900. To view a full list of Education journals, please visit: http://www.educationarena.com/journals/bySubject.asp

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