Two new English journals

New journals appear quite frequently in our various resources. JSTOR is an unusual resource because it gives us access not to current journals but to the archive of journals. JSTOR now gives us access to English Education and Research in the Teaching of English. There aren’t yet available via catalogue links so go directly to JSTOR and browse through the available journals. We hold issues of these two extending from the 1960s through to 2005. The catalogue entries for English Education and Research in the Teaching of English will give you information and links for accessing current issues.

New serials requests

The Library considers new serial requests once a year around July/August and any that are approved will begin in the new year. If you have any requests please send them through now.

Because serials represent an ongoing cost for us, they require an extra level of justification in terms of how they will be used, what they contribute to the existing collection, their relative importance etc. If you send through a request I will be in touch about some of these issues.

Journals approved in 2008 are listed below, mainly relevant to teacher education courses at Bundoora. I’m happy to receive requests from all areas, including for the Carlton, Swanston and Brunswick sites.

• Lets Find Out
• Teaching Children Mathematics 
• Waikato Journal of Education 
• New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies 

New journal table of contents alerting service

ticTOCs is a new scholarly journal tables of contents (TOCs) service. It’s free, its easy to use, and it provides access to the most recent tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers. It helps scholars, researchers, academics and anyone else keep up-to-date with what’s being published in the most recent issues of journals on almost any subject.

I have tried it against some of the journals listed on our education guide. The coverage of Australian education journals is not yet great, but it does have reasonable coverage of the education field more generally. A lot of publisher sites and databases offer various forms of alerting services, but this recource promises to draw them together in one site.

It allows table of contents for favourite journals to appear as an RSS feed. It also apparently allows you to register so that your favourite journals are visible each time you login.

UPDATE: There doesn’t seem to be an automatic registration and because to the popularity of the service it took over a week for them to confirm my registration. But I am registered now.

New serials requests

The Library considers requests for new serials once every year around July/August. Serials represent an ongoing expense so requests usually need some justification in terms of its usefulness for particular courses, numbers of students expected to be using it, quality of the journal etc.

I have requests so far for:

• Mathematics teaching in Middle School
• Teaching Children Mathematics
• Let’s Find Out

If you would like the Library to consider subscribing to a journal now would be a good time to let me know.

Sage Journals Online

The Library now has access to a collection called Sage Journals Online. This includes all the journals in the Sage Education collection (see the website for a list of titles) as well as others in the social sciences more generally. We trialled this last year and have now gone ahead with the purchase.