Identifying and accessing items held elsewhere

Students/staff are sometimes wanting to find books and other material not held at RMIT Library. My message to students in various information skills classes is that there are always ways of identifying where such material is held and ways of accessing it.

First thing to do is to look up the item in the Library catalogue just to confirm that it is not held. If an item is held at another campus then you can use the catalogue ‘place a HOLD’ function to bring the item across to your home campus. When doing this, be sure to check the pick up location is your home library.

If we don’t have a book and you think it would be a good item for us to have in our collection then you can either email me with the details or submit a purchase recommendation form.

If a book is not held at RMIT University, staff and students can borrow from other Victorian academic libraries by presenting a student/staff card and CAVAL card to the library from which they wish to borrow. You will need to organise the CAVAL card from RMIT University Library prior to going to the other library. You can also borrow from academic libraries interstate just by presenting photo ID and a current RMIT University staff or student card.

If you want to find out where an item is held then Libraries Australia is invaluable for identifying where books, journals and other material are held around the country. The Library website also has links to the catalogues of other Victorian academic Libraries.

You can also request a book or copy of an article etc via Document Delivery Services. Simply register using the form on the website and you will be sent login details. Make your requests online and books will be sent to your home library and articles will be provided in digital form for you to download. There is no charge for this although quotas apply.

Government launches a new early years portal

Julia Gillard has just issued a press release announcing the launch of a new “virtual children’s hub”:

mychild.gov.au is a virtual children’s hub for parents and carers which provides access to important health, early learning, child care and parenting support information in one convenient location.

I have added a link to the site from our Early Childhood Education subject guide.

Recent library sessions for the School’s TAFE students

I gave some classes to ESL groups recently in the city. I mentioned last year that I really enjoy these classes, mainly because I find the students so interested and engaged. I find much the same thing with the Foundation studies students and Diploma of Further Education students.

Such students come into the Library (at Carlton and Swanston) for tours, catalogue sessions, database sessions and sessions on evaluating internet sites. Along the way they learn to analyse their research topics, develop key words for searching, become familiar with some key resources (such as Factiva for newspaper articles and Australian Public Affairs full text for local magazine and journal articles), and learn how to access the material. These are a terrific group of programs and teachers, and the research topics are often interesting and stimulating for students.

Here are the guides and tutorials for these areas (I’ve already mentioned that we will be putting together a further guide for VCE soon).

• Foundation studies resources
• Library skills for foundation students
• ESL (English as a Second Language)

Image searching

A colleague sent through a link to a useful tutorial on image searching recently. Some arts education courses have students look for images and this tutorial has a useful emphasis on copyright issues. The Library has a listing of image resources, both subscribed and public access, that I sometimes show students. Some of these resources make it clear that images can be used for educational purposes.

The other emerging area, which this tutorial mentions, are those made available via a Creative Commons license. People who upload their photos to Flickr, for example, can stipulate the kind of use they allow and you can search specifically for items with Creative Commons licensed content. I have been using photos from Flickr for our subject guides, for example.

Scopus database on trial

The Library has a trial currently of Scopus, a major abstract and citation database and web-based research tool provided by Elsevier in cooperation with a number of university research libraries. It covers the broad discipline areas, including the social sciences. There has been a lot of interest in Scopus over the last little while because, like Web of Science, it allows you to measure research impact by giving you information on the citation of articles, papers and other document types.

Should we add this database to our collections? Please give it a try and use our evaluation form to let us know soon.

How can we make our School of Education library subject guides more useful?

As I’ve mentioned previously, we have now transferred our School of Education subject guides across to the new libguide format and have developed a number of new ones. I thought I would try now to attend various program meetings to promote them and see if there is any way we can improve them. You will see that these guides list key subject areas, journals, databases, websites, reference information for the various program areas within the School.

I’m happy to receive suggestions on better ways to organise them, resources to include, resources that are not really needed, new guides to develop. If you would like help linking them into your online course I can do that also.

Finally, these guides are very easy to put together and update so we can create resource guides for very particular purposes. We can also create a page within one of the guides for a particular course.

General

• Education
• Library Research Skills for Education Students

Adult and professional education

• Tertiary Teaching and Learning
• Adult Education and Training
• Educational Leadership
• Career Education (under development)

Further education programs

• Foundation Studies Resources
• Library skills for Foundation Studies
• ESL (English as a Second Language)
• VCE/VCAL (under development)

Teacher education

• Early Childhood Education
• Children’s Literature
• Primary Education
• Secondary Education
• Curriculum Resources for Education

Using Endnote for collaboration

One of my colleagues recently drew our attention to a page put up by the University of Queensland Library on using Endnote for collaboration. Since I have been asked for advice previously on how to manage this I thought would pass it on here.

The process is not straightforward and this page covers a variety of scenarios. It includes researchers working off a library on a network with one person nominated to maintain and update it. it might involve several researchers working from a single library with one person nominated as editor and sending out updated versions of the library each time a modification is made. It might involve researchers working on separate parts of a document, combining their documents and libraries, and then identifying and removing duplicates.

Textbooks for 2009

The RMIT Bookshop recently sent out a memo to staff, which included a reminder about submitting their lists of textbooks for 2009. These lists also form the basis for Library’s purchase of textbooks. When lists are submitted to the bookshop, books are purchased automatically for the Library. 

We purchase multiple copies according to number of students expected and whether the item is a prescribed or recommended reading:

Prescribed textbooks
ONE copy of a text for every 10-20 students (maximum: 3 copies)

Recommended textbooks
ONE copy of a text for every 10-20 students (maximum: 7 copies)

Of course, you can also send any requests for the Library to purchase items directly to me or via the request form.

Two databases on trial

On trial until 22 October 2008

BERG Journals offers university libraries a wide range of journals with a strong focus on culture and the visual arts. Berg journals collection holds currently 13 peer-reviewed and highly respected publications with 3 launches planned in 2009. All journals are ideally suited to undergraduate and graduate students, and lecturers across research departments.

The following journals are available for the BERG journal trial:

• Anthrozoos
• Cultural and Social History
• Cultural Politics
• The Design
• Fashion Theory
• Food, Culture & Society
• Home Cultures
• The Journal of Modern Craft
• Material Religion
• Photography & Culture
• The Senses & Society
• Textile
• Time & Mind

Inderscience are publishers of academic, scientific and professional journals in the areas of:

• Science, engineering and technology
• Management, business administration and law
• Computing, internet and ICT
• Energy, environment and sustainable development.
• Economics, accounting and finance
• Education, learning and human resources development
• Healthcare and medical engineering
• Public policy and public administration
• Risk assessment, safety and emergency management
• Arts, entertainment and leisure

Should we add these resources to our collections? Test these databases and use our evaluation form to let us know what you think.