The University has invested in a major refurbishment of the library this summer. Over 2 million pounds will be spent on the 2nd and 5th Floors to provide state-of-the-art collaborative and quiet study space and additional power sockets. Read more about the refurbishment here.
Scheduled maintenance will take place beginning on Sunday January 20 2013 at 1400 and ending by Monday January 21 2013 at 0200. Web of Science may not be available during that period.
Following a tendering exercise earlier this year The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) chose the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) to operate the National Chemical Database Service from 2013-2017. Daresbury, the current operators, will cease to run the database after December 2012.
For more information on the change over see the Daresbury site
Read about the RSC plans for the service.
This item was posted recently on a mailing list for science and technology librarians by Adrian Smith, from the University of Leeds
“The influence of high-impact factor journals is declining, according to a study published this week (November 7) in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. The findings raise questions over the relationship between the impact-factor—the current best measure of a publication’s influence—and the number of citations subsequently received by papers published in that journal.”
“The authors suggest the decline can be attributed to how the Internet has transformed the way researchers search for and source articles. “Search engines provide access to all articles, whether or not they are published in prestigious journals,” Vincent Larivière, an information scientist at the University of Montreal and co-author of the study, said …
The Library has launched Enterprise, the new, improved Library catalogue. It will help you find relevant items within Library collections as well as in Special Collections of rare books and archives and the Museum of English Rural Life’s collections. Read more about Enterprise. Use Enterprise itself here
The 2011 data for Journal Citation Reports is now available.
The E-journals Finder is working again
As discussion about Open Access to publically funded research continues there was an interesting article in Monday’s Guardian newspaper
Anyone using the ticTOCs Journal Table of Contents Service for current awareness should be aware that ths service will cease “in the next month or two”.
If you use or link to ticTOCs you are advised to use the JournalTOCs service instead.
If you have created a MyTOCs set on ticTOCs you can migrate the set to JournalTOCs. Find information here.
If you were using the ticTOCs API to pull journal feeds into your own pages then you are recommended to switch to the journalTOCs API which works the same way.
If you were using the ticTOCs text.php file to populate your own service you are recommended instead to make API calls to journalTOCs for each journal – see more information here.
If you have any questions please e-mail ticTOCs@mimas.ac.uk.
Mail Boxes Etc. is now open in the RUSU building, and they specialise in binding dissertations and theses.