The Subject pages, they are a-changing

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You might notice some exciting changes to your Subject pages on the library website over the next few months as they are redesigned to make it easier for you to choose the most relevant subject-specific resources for your assignments and projects.

You can get a really good feel for the new look and feel from this subject page for Business & Management, although the pages for different subjects will be designed to support different subjects.

When they are finished at the start of the new year, we hope you like the new Subject pages as much as we do!

An example of a new-look Subject page.

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The value of critical reading

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TextbookAre you a lecturer, course developer or academic skills tutor wondering how to convince students of the purpose and value of engaging with further reading or a student wondering whether all this reading you are given has a purpose?  Our new “information literacy” web page explains the purpose and hidden skills you are learning in easy to understand, bite-size chunks.

In preparation for September

It’s a little bald at the moment, comprising just the bare text, but we are working on adding images and even video clips for the start of term to make it come alive and pop with excitement.  These pages are therefore ideal for embedding in your Moodle modules or sharing with students who want to understand the process and purpose of reading and critical thinking in learning.

Check out our Information Literacy pages here.

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Hot off the press

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While we are emerging from lockdown, you may not want to trek to the shops to buy your regular newspaper and magazine in print form.  Indeed, you might never want to buy them again since we now offer the latest issues of nearly 7000 titles electronically for free through our latest subscription to PressReader.  These include newspapers and popular magazines on topics ranging from music, film, travel, photography, cookery, parenting, animals, crafts, fish ion, and sports to current affairs and more.
The only wrinkle is that you have to register the first time you use it using your University email address, while signed into the VPN.  Click Read more below for a step-by-step walkthrough of the registration process.

Read more ›

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News flash for teaching and learning

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Not a lot of people know just how many news resources we have tucked away.  From archives of scanned newspaper pages from the 18th century to the present day and up-to-the-minute text-only collections for all major newspapers and magazines worldwide, we have broad coverage of broadsheets, tabloids all of which students can use in assignments and teaching staff can include in their teaching materials and reading lists.

Don’t miss our latest subscription to Pressreader, providing facsimile format newspapers and magazines from around 70 countries, making keeping up to date with the latest global news, fashion and social commentary easy even during lockdown when printed magazines are less accessible.

Read more ›

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New eBooks – June 2020

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What follows is a list of new ebooks received by the Library during June 2020 ordered by title. More complete details, as well as listings from previous months, are available on our website’s New Books page in the form of downloadable Excel spreadsheets.

Note: a large than usual amount of ebooks have been added in June to help support students during the Library closure

Read more ›

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New Books – June 2020

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What follows is a list of new books received in the Library during June 2020 ordered by classmark. More complete details, as well as listings from previous months, are available on our website’s New Books page in the form of downloadable Excel spreadsheets.

Read more ›

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No news yet about library reopening

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We have been receiving lots of enquiries about when the Library will reopen.  Sadly, we do not yet have a fixed date by which we expect to be open.

Our management team are working tirelessly to draw up plans for the Library to be safely reopened as soon as possible while maintaining social distancing.  Unfortunately, the Library is the most complex building on campus to manage because of the number of narrow walkways and staircases and the many functions and services offered.

We will let you all the moment we have a confirmed re-opening date.  Until then, you can access all of our online resources through our website and you can chat to us online 24/7 about any difficulties or to ask our friendly team for help and advice.

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Introducing Scopus – your second home for search

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Scopus is a very different resource to those you may have come across before.  You can search it like the EBSCO Discovery Service or any other database, but using Scopus you can also find how many articles published by a particular author and how many published more recently have cited a particular article simply by clicking on the “times cited” link.  This means that you can find everything published by the most important experts in a field or go from a famous seminal paper that unlocked a topic to see find everything published since.  The only other resource to offer this is Web of Science Core Collection with its Author and Cited Reference searches.

Scopus’ basic search is one of the easiest to use, operating much like a Google search, while its “Advanced” search offers one of the most sophisticated search building toolsets around.

If you are a researcher publishing your own work, check out the SciVal service within Scopus to see how much impact you are having on your field and evaluate your research strategy.  Chat to your Faculty Librarian for more details.

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Introducing Statista: painting a picture with numbers

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“Data! Data! Data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.”

~ Sherlock Holmes

Whether you want to know how many Costa outlets have opened in London last year, the outlook of the cosmetics market in Hong Kong or which are the three historically most popular British coastal holiday destinations (hint: they include Portsmouth!), Statista has the data you need to see what is going on and about to happen in future.  Covering topics of interest to anyone studying social and consumer trends, politics as well as business, Statista is our broadest and most accessible statistical resource.

Refreshingly simple to use, Statista comprises a whole host of global market, industry, company and customer data.  From a simple search, you can filter your results or just look down the list of icons to see what types of information are available – from analytical reports to simple statistics and figures you can use and cite in your work.  Speaking of which, everything in Statista is also easy to reference.

Highlights

Highlights include:

  • Top statistics on various topics compiled by experts on all manner of consumer markets
  • Industry reports comprising an overview of all kinds of different industries
  • Reports on different countries and individual cities that are globally important business hubs
  • Customer profiles and customer satisfaction data for major brands
  • Toplists of companies in a given industry or region
  • Outlook reports for digital, consumer goods and mobility sectors
  • Market research survey findings.
  • In-depth market studies and industry reports

Have a play!

See what interesting or shocking facts and figures you can dig out to impress your friends!  If you want to know more about how to get the most from Statista or you cannot find the information you need, please ask our friendly team or get in touch with your faculty librarian directly to request a demonstration.

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Here’s a (K)novel resource!

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Knovel is one of the most novel approaches to presenting information we have ever seen.  Offering a choice between standard search and an interactive matrix of search criteria that return physico-chemical data, formulae, information, and more for the physical sciences, it draws from a large collection of authoritative reference sources and is arguably the best place to start looking for the physical and engineering properties of materials.

Search

Opening Knovel, you are given the usual option to search across all the reference resources or browse each individual reference work in the collection individually as an ebook.

Property search

The second main feature is the “property search”, which offers a way to look up physical and physico-chemical properties of plastics, composites, metals, alloys, and more by searching for a material and then selecting desired properties from a sidebar showing all the available topics to narrow your search.  The results then show all the matching results from across all the reference works included in the Knovel collection, including graphs, tables of physical properties and encyclopedia entries.

Read more ›

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