College Library News

After a trial during the spring, and then nothing, suddenly we appear to be subscribed to SCOPUS, Elsevier’s massive bibliographic database. Larger than Web of Science or any other database of ite kind. There is even an ‘ejournals@cambrigde’ icon to highjlight resources which to which we have full text online access: flickr. However, I could not make it work!
One important limitation of SCOPUS is that nothing prioir to 1996 is inclueded in the database - so you will have to switch to another database for older references.

25 July 2008

New Database - Northern Ireland: A Divided Community, 1921-1972: Cabinet Papers of the Stormont Administration

Presents a full record of every cabinet meeting for the duration of the Stormont administration, the devolved government of Northern Ireland, 1921-72. Separate files exist for each Cabinet meeting and include minutes and memoranda. The discussions and decisions reflect the wide range of problems and activities involved in making the new administration work. Topics debated and reported in just one sample year of the Troubles (1970) include: policing, arms and explosives, social need, Prevention of Incitement to Religious Hatred, Army occupation of factories, road spiking, routing of Orange Day parades, dock strikes, law and order, riots and the roles of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

URL for resource: http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itweb/cambuni.

No passwords are needed on campus, and off-campus access is available via Raven.

If you like this, try these:

Macmillan Cabinet Papers, 1957 - 1963 has complete coverage of the Cabinet Conclusions
(Minutes) and Memoranda during the Macmillan Administration, 1957-1963, a period which
witnessed events such as the foundation of the EEC by Treaty of Rome, the building of the
Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 18th – 20th century. This includes over 200,000
House of Commons sessional papers from 1715 to the present.

New Database - International tables of crystallography

Definitive resource and reference work for crystallography. Each volume in the series contains articles and tables of data relevant to crystallographic research and to applications of crystallographic methods in all sciences concerned with the structure and properties of materials. Emphasis is given to symmetry, diffraction methods and techniques of crystal
structure determination, and the physical and chemical properties of crystals. The data are
accompanied by discussions of theory, practical explanations and examples, all of which are useful for teaching. International Tables for Crystallography Online provides the full set of
all the Volumes A to G including A1 (6000 pages) in pdf format and provides access to the
International Tables Online site hosted by the International Union of Crystallography.

URL for resource: http://it.iucr.org

No passwords are needed on campus, and off-campus access is available via Raven.

If you like this, try this: Science Direct contains articles covering a broad range of subjects,
including Chemistry, Materials Science and Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology.

New Database - Dictionary of medical biography

Provides authoritative biographical coverage of major medical practitioners in all times and cultures. While its emphasis is on practitioners within the Western medical tradition, it also covers practitioners of alternative medicines, as well as major figures within traditional Chinese, Indian, and Islamic medicine. In addition, special essays survey these medical traditions, which are more difficult to appreciate within a biographical framework. Overall, the Dictionary of
Medical Biography concentrates on the nuances of medical practice, and the social context within which ideas of health, disease, and therapy exist.

URL for resource: http://ebooks.greenwood.com

No passwords are needed on campus, and off-campus access is available via Raven.

ISI Web of Knowledge news

An upgrade to ISI Web of Knowledge on 20 July introduced new features, including:

Citation Map’s Introduction in Web of Science (visual map image displays)
support of browser back button from Full Record to Summary page
inclusion of DOI metadata information in Search Summary, Full Records and Output
sort by Times Cited for results in the All Database search
search by Address in the All Databases search.

Web Based training materials, including Free Web Ex sessions on “New in the Web of
Knowledge — Citation Mapping and other enhancements” are available at http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/support/training/webtraining.

Web of Knowledge is available from http://wok.mimas.ac.uk/.

No passwords are needed on campus, and off-campus access is available via Raven.

ATHENS and RAVEN - Major Changes to Access control for electronic resources

Please note that current unexpired ATHENS accounts will cease to work at the end of July 2008. All new users of electronic resources should use RAVEN to authenticate themselves as current staff or students of the University and obtain access to ATHENS protected services. Existing ATHENS users are strongly encouraged to move to using RAVEN before 31 July and must do so thereafter to continue to have access to electronic resources.

For further information please visit: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/electronicresources/athenschanges.html

All resources can be found using the links on the electronic resources pages of the University
Library website at http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/electronicresources/

Some dude from Norway, Alexander Refsum Jensenius, has written a short step-by-step instruction on how to export references from Google Scholar . could be useful. Commenters point to web apps like CiteULike, WizFolio and a downloadable app for organizing PDF files called Papers - which is Mac only.

Please note that the Census Registration Service news page has recently been updated with a new edition which can also be downloaded in PDF.

Coming soon (it says here)…

Introducing the most important and innovative indexing advancement in over 30 years, CSA Illustrata provides web-based access to indexed tables, figures, maps, graphs, charts and other images contained in scholarly articles. This unique tool provides researchers precision, efficiency, and relevance in the data discovery process. Users can display the full image, including captions and label text – all of which can be easily saved or imported and used for presentations, lectures or research. The first database in the family, CSA Illustrata: Natural Sciences, includes tables and figures from more than 1,000 journals from prominent publishers resulting in more than 1 million indexed images.

Zoho, a provider of a suite of online office products and productivity tools, has introduced the beta of its free wiki product, Zoho Wiki. A wiki is a collaborative web based document which can be edited by either anyone (open) or only ceratin perople (closed). Zoho itself is an excellent free web based software portal with word processing, spreadsheet and many other applications. It makes collaborative production of documents much easier by keeping the files on the web for each person to access. Zoho is a brand of the software company AdventNet, Inc.

In addition to the standard wiki features, the new Zoho Wiki offers the following:

Microsoft has added Live Search Books to its growing list of Live Search options - a rival project to Google Book Search. Live Search is the new improved MSN Search and Microsoft’s attempt to catch up with Google. Let me remind you that Live Search already offers an Academic option similar to Google Scholar with a useful emphasis on references. And, naturally, there’s maps as well, like Google maps but, some say, better?

10 Academic Resources Daily aims to ‘… provide valuable solutions for students and young researchers; disseminate additional knowledge, skills and attitudes… communicate within the academic community… share information about scholarships, grants, conferences, study abroad opportunities, exchange and professional training programs and internships all over the world.’

Access to the Oxford Journal Archive will be available to University of Cambridge users once the licence agreement, which has just been completed, has been processed. The Oxford Journals Digital Archive, launched in April of this year, provides access to all journal content from volume one, issue one, until the end of 1995 for over 140 journals.

It follows a digitisation programme undertaken by Oxford Journals, which is a division of Oxford University Press. The archive is seen to serve as an adjunct to current e-journals, supporting research in many areas, particularly the humanities and social sciences which have, up to now, had little historical digital material to search. The archive, with 300,000 journal articles dating back to 135 years, covers topics in the humanities, sciences, medicine, law and the social sciences.

The list includes many titles not previously available electronically within the university and for a proportion of titles the addition of the archive provides access to a complete run of issues to date. The collection covers the sciences, medicine, humanities and social sciences and is the most significant addition to date to the list of electronic journal backfiles in humanities and social sciences.

All titles have been added to the ejournals@cambridge portal and will be added within a month to the University’s online Newton catalogue.

PRESS RELEASE FROM JISC

Major journals archive made available free to UK universities

JISC agreement with Oxford University Press brings 135 years of scholarly resources online.

6th June 2006. An archive totalling over 3 million pages from 300,000 journal articles and encompassing over 135 years of human knowledge is being made available free of charge to the UK academic community in perpetuity.

JISC and Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press, today announced an agreement which will see major collections of journal articles in the humanities, sciences, medicine, law and the social sciences made available to all higher education institutions, collections which include many of the leading titles in their fields over the last two centuries. The archive, if purchased individually, would cost in the region of £80,000 per institution.

The agreement represents a significant commitment to the widening of access to major scholarly resources and follows a programme of digitization undertaken by Oxford Journals. Functionality incorporated by the archive includes full text pdfs of each article with HTML headers and abstracts, full text searching, the inclusion of all images and graphics, and links to ’similar articles in this journal’.

Lorraine Estelle, JISC Collections Team Manager, said: “This agreement makes available a wide range of complete runs of journals to far more students and staff than would otherwise be able to access them. The response we received from the community during the consultation process was extremely enthusiastic and thanks to their support, JISC is delighted with this opportunity to work with Oxford University Press on an agreement which will help to enrich teaching, learning and research across a range of subjects.”

Martin Richardson, Managing Director, Oxford Journals, commented: “This agreement with JISC is a major boost towards ensuring scholarly research is accessible for the future. With content from 140 titles dating back to 1849, the Oxford Journals archive makes available important knowledge that may previously have been hard to find, or was not accessible at all. We’re delighted that JISC is enabling UK researchers to benefit from this significant collection.”

Liz Chapman, Deputy Director of UCL Library Services, said: “Accessing this archive is like walking through The Looking Glass into another era. Here we are given the ability to make a systematic review of early research articles in a variety of subjects. Here television is new and is early criticized and clinical trials are executed by doctors on themselves. It is a marvellous adjunct to current e-journals and will support research in many areas, particularly the humanities and social sciences which have up to now had little historical digital material to search.”

A complete list of available titles, with dates of coverage, is available at Oxford Journal Archive.

News from Patricia Killiard, Head of Electronic Services and Systems
Cambridge University Library:

The University Library is pleased to announce that it has subscribed to the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England online, published by Scholarly Digital Editions.

The Parliament Rolls are accessible without passwords within the University to staff, students, and library users at http://www.sd-editions.com/PROME/home.html .

Edited by C. Given-Wilson et al, the collection contains the full text and translation of the meetings of the English parliament from Edward I to Henry VII, covering the years from 1272 to 1504. All surviving records of the parliaments, including many texts never before published, are given in full, with new scholarly introductions to each parliament. The parliament rolls themselves are freshly transcribed from the original documents, while the transcripts incorporate precise information about the text in the documents (e.g., deleted and unreadable text) never before available.

A link has been added to the University Library e-resources list at http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/electronicresources/index.htm .

Negotiations are continuing between ProQuest, the publisher, and
JISC, on behalf of UK universities, on licensing the 19th Century
Parliamentary Papers online for access within the universities.
More information on this is expected in June. Access to the 18th
Century Parliamentary Papers is due to be made available in the course of
the summer.

UPDATE: In fact ProQuest have recently completed the digitization of the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers from 1801 to 1900.