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/

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.

From 1 June access to wireless networking from laptops will be available in the University Library’s West Room for staff and students of the university via the Computing Service’s pilot “Lapwing” service. Raven passwords will be required (see the Computing Service web pages for details).

Lapwing, a wireless hot-spot service, is currently being piloted within the Computing Service. Advice and instruction leaflets will be available shortly. Lapwing should enable many users to dispense with the installation and configuration of VPDN client software, and set up a wireless connection more straightforwardly via Raven.

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.

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

As featured in a brief article in the January edition of the University Library Readers’ Newsletter, the library has acquired the complete backfiles of Elsevier ScienceDirect electronic journals with funding from HEFCE’s Science Research Infrastructure Fund.

As an addition to the electronic resources offered by the University Library it is unprecedented. Each of the 2,152 journal titles is available from the first issue of publication, making available a total of over 7 million articles in a cross-searchable collection. Access to the ScienceDirect backfiles is available university-wide along with the current content at http://www.sciencedirect.com. For access within the university no passwords are required. Off-campus access is available for holders of Athens passwords [note that Athens passwords may be obtained from your faculty library or the UL].

All entries in ejournals@cambridge have been updated to reflect the new coverage of ScienceDirect. Entries in the University Library’s Newton Catalogue and the Universal Catalogue will be amended within the next few weeks.

Information about the backfile coverage, including downloadable spreadsheets of titles in each subject area, is available from the Elsevier ScienceDirect web site at
http://www.info.sciencedirect.com/content/journals/backfiles/. All subject collections, including supplements, have been acquired.

Key journals include The Lancet, from 1823 onwards, Physics Reports, Analytica Chimica Acta, Topology, Behaviour Research and Therapy, Neuroscience, Research in Microbiology, and Cell. As well as making existing peer-reviewed titles held within the University more readily accessible, the electronic backfiles widen the range of titles immediately available in Cambridge, obviating the need to acquire articles through document delivery and inter-library loan. This initiative moves the University Library a step closer to meeting demands for all journals to be available online. In addition to the e-journal backfiles the agreement with Elsevier will add a number of major electronic reference works to the collection, including the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Encyclopedia of Biological Chemistry, Encyclopedia of Neurological Sciences, and Comprehensive Coordination Chemistry II.

Trial access to The National Archives DocumentsOnline service is available to staff and students of the university for a period of 30 days. Athens passwords
are required for the service at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/athens .

DocumentsOnline provides access to The National Archives’ collection of digitised public records, including both academic and family history sources. This vast collection has application to a wide range of subject areas, in particular Social History, Sociology and the Law, International Relations/Politics, Politics particularly political history, Conflict Studies, Legal History, History, Military History and Art History and Architecture. Its ‘about’ page summarizes all the content it covered by the service.

There are also many historical maps, diagrams, photographs and films available in the collection which, like the rest of the information available, can be inserted into teaching packs, learning materials, student essays and presentations.

DocumentsOnline is a subscription service. Feedback on the trial should be sent to it_services at the lib.cam.ac.uk domain to assist in evaluating its usefulness for research and teaching.

The College website recently appeared in a new format. Unfortunately, it has a tedious ‘enter here’ front page (not so good - but at least it is not some ‘Flash’-based ‘intro’). Better to use this URL to get straight in. Also, again unfortunately, the website designers changed the URL of the library web page with no prior warning and no redirection - not web-friendly standard practice, surely? The library is now even more securely hidden away under ‘Teaching’ at http://www.homerton.cam.ac.uk/teaching/library/index.html (the ‘old’ web address still does not work at time of writing). Some of the text on our web page has still not been updated either - but we hope to have this done before next week when students are starting to return for the new academic year. On the positive side, at least they’ve got rid of the awful dark blue background.

Coincidentally, the University Library (UL) site has also had a change of format. Now this is definitely an improvement. There is even a more obvious link from the front page (under ‘Digital Library’) to DSpace@Cambridge - the university’s institutional repository where research and other material produced by University staff can be archived - mostly in ‘open access’ form so that anyone with internet can access it.

The way University of Cambridge libraries are arranged can be confusing at first. The UL front page includes this useful introduction:

“Welcome to the website of Cambridge University Library. As well as being the main library for the University we are one of six legal deposit libraries in the British Isles [like the British Library which means, incidentally, that UL should be given a copy of every item that is published]. Our main mission is to deliver world-class library and information services to meet the needs of the local, national and international scholarly community.

“The libraries in the University are organised in a tripartite system - [1] University Library and its Dependent Libraries, [2] Departmental and Faculty Libraries, and [3] College Libraries [that’s us]. Information about libraries in the University and Affiliated Institutions can be found at libraries@cambridge.”

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

A new agreement for the Cambridge Scientific Abstracts collection of databases will increase the number of CSA titles available to members of the university from today (Thursday 1 September).

In addition to the Core Collection, ASSIA (Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts) and LISA (Library and Information Science Abstracts), to which the University Library previously subscribed, the list now includes all CSA proprietary titles. New databases available through this arrangement are:

- ANTE: Abstracts in New Technologies & Engineering
- Aqualine (water resources)
- ARTbibliographies Modern (ABM)
- BHI: British Humanities Index
- CSA Aerospace & High Technology Database
- CSA/ASCE Civil Engineering Abstracts
- CSA Mechanical & Transportation Engineering Abstracts
- CSA Physical Education Index
- CSA Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
- Design and Applied Arts Index (DAAI)

Two further databases to which members of the university have access will continue to be hosted by CSA: Criminal Justice Abstracts and the Index Islamicus.

Access to all the databases is available from the Cambridge Scientific Abstracts Illumina site . Note that this link will only work on-campus - no passwords are required within the ‘cam.ac.uk’ domain. Off-campus access is available using Athens passwords. CSA provides a user guide on its site.

The new titles will be added shortly to the list of electronic resources on the UL web pages.

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

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) The SEP is a dynamic online reference work, which is designed to be responsive to new research in philosophy. It is widely considered amongst the academic community as being an integral part of philosophy teaching and research in the UK. Institutions will have free online access to authoritative peer reviewed material to support those studying philosophy.

JISC’s and the Stanford University’s commitment to Open Access principles means that the general public can also access these materials for free. JISC funding of membership dues on behalf of UK further and higher institutions contributes to the permanent operating fund securing the SEP’s future. This means that it can continue to be provided on an Open Access basis as well as being run for the benefit of the global academic community.

With the SEP, staff and students can:

• Download and store SEP entries for personal use
• Keep up to date with new research as the authors and subject editors work together to constantly revise and review entries to ensure that the SEP remains current and authoritative
• Use SEP across a wide variety of subject disciplines within the sciences and humanities, including aesthetics, ethics, feminism, philosophy of law, logic, metaphysics and philosophy of science
• Access and download certain usage statistics . Easily find the information they are looking. Users are more likely to find the SEP entries through a web search than any other philosophy reference work .