Dates of scheduled meetings: Product Update: Web of Knowledge, publications database and bibliometric services

Further to the recent notification that Thomson Reuters (Scientific) will be holding a series of meetings to announce updates in relation to Web of Knowledge, publications database and bibliometric services, the following meetings have been arranged:

Monday, 27 October: Institute of Education, London, 10 am - 1 pm Tuesday, 4 November: University of Glasgow, 10 am - 1 pm Thursday, 6 November: King's College London, 10 am - 1 pm

The main points covered will be:

- Provision of core bibliometric services from Thomson Reuters to support increasing reliance upon metrics

- Review of the JISC Licence to support the creation / maintenance of a Publications Database

- Development / individualisation of core services to ensure institutional requirements are met

- Inclusion of ISI Proceedings, Social Sciences within Web of Knowledge, to ensure full citation coverage of an institution / academic

The meeting format will be a presentation with some online examples, with the last hour set aside for questions.

If you wish to attend any of these meetings, please contact the Mimas helpdesk at wok@mimas.ac.uk

Alternatively, if you are willing for your institution to host one of these meetings, please get in touch with us at the Mimas helpdesk at wok@mimas.ac.uk

Date of next meeting with OVID

JIBS User Group Committee has an enhancement group which meets with Ovid (Wolters Kluwer Health) from time to time. Our next meeting with Ovid will be towards the end of November. If there are topics you wish the Group to raise with Ovid please contact me, a.smith at leeds.ac.uk

British Standards Online

The JIBS BSOL enhancement group met with BSI in June. At that meeting BSI indicated that it was working with a new software company to develop and enhance BSOL and that it hoped that from September it would be able to start a series of releases to enhance the service, especially in the usability area. It was hoped that the enhancements suggested by the JIBS group and others would gradually be rolled out in an iterative manner, with users seeing frequent smaller releases rather than fewer larger releases.
Unfortunately a review of the fundamental architecture of the current database suggests that it may be more difficult than was envisaged to make frequent changes to the system without risking service interruptions. BSI is now reviewing technical options for the delivery of a series of regular releases and in particular is looking at ways that the enhancements to usability can be made.

BSI has promised to keep the group informed of development and consult with us. We are planning to have another formal meeting in January 2009, when we hope there will have been some progress, and we will have a clearer idea of the way that the database interface can be improved.

JISC Collections agreements for four free journal archives

Supporting teaching and research with free access to online journal archives:

Over 800,000 journal articles made freely available to universities, research councils and colleges in the UK

Following an open procurement process JISC Collections is making four journal archives freely available, to all colleges, universities and research councils in the UK. These archives from the American Chemical Society, Brill Academic Publishers, ProQuest, and Taylor & Francis include 230 peer reviewed journals with some of the most important articles in the arts, built environment, humanities, life sciences, physical sciences and the social sciences.

JISC Collections’ purchase of these archives means that researchers, teaching staff and students can now have free access to more than 150 years of content and over 800,000 fully searchable articles.

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JIBS Workshop: How to compete with Google

The next JIBS User Group workshop will be:

How to compete with Google: Simple Resource Discovery Systems for Libraries

November 13, 2008 at the Diskus Conference Centre in London.

The idea for this workshop was sparked by a recent discussion on the 'lis-infoliteracy' list: is information literacy training essential for students to get the best out of their library resources or should we just be making our resource discovery systems easier to use? The debate will be summarised by one of its protagonists, Mark Hepworth of University of Loughborough. Maggie Fieldhouse will provide an insight into the information seeking behaviour of students and researchers. We will then look at some new 'one-stop shop' library products: Primo, Aquabrowser, ELIN and Encore, which are beginning to be introduced into HE libraries in the UK.

The intended audience for this workshop is librarians from UK HE and FE institutions. Priority bookings will be allocated accordingly but we welcome applications from other interested parties.

For a full programme and booking form please visit the JIBS website:
http://www.jibs.ac.uk/events/workshops/simplerds/

a-n The Artist Information Company renewal

a-n Resources provides online access to a variety of publications, an image bank, a platform for creative writing, research papers, and artist blogs. It also contains a knowledge bank providing advice on career development and includes 40 practical guides, and professional development tools with customisable interactive guides to contracts and artists' fees.

The publications included are a-n Magazine, a-n Collections, Future Forecast, Good Practice, Artists' Toolkits, Compass (HE publication), Signpost (HE publication) and NAN publications. Subscribers also receive two copies of a-n Magazine when published, and two copies of printed a-n supplements.

The breadth and depth of the content makes it suitable for a wide range of subject and curriculum areas at all study and career levels including: art and design; fine art; applied art and craft; art history, cultural policy, curatorial practice and social policy.

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New JISC Collections agreement for Who's Who and Who Was Who

Who’s Who provides a fascinating insight into the private lives of public figures by providing information on over 32,000 influential people in British public life today. Detailed information on each person is provided, which includes birthdays, families, education, titles, career, publications and creative works, personal interests, clubs and contact details. Key international figures are also included in this resource, eg Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, Venus Williams, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Cruise, Bill Clinton and Woody Allen. It will be updated throughout the year, eg if subjects die, their death dates will be added. The information is gathered from the individuals themselves, from the Prime Minister down, and is carefully checked and standardised. It is, therefore, an essential reference which provides entries on people in government, business, professional and cultural institutions, education and charities.

You can extend your subscription to include Who Was Who, which collects together the entries of more than 100,000 people who were included in the register but have died since 1897.

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New JISC Collections agreement for the Encyclopedia of Popular Music

The Encyclopedia of Popular Music is a comprehensive reference work devoted exclusively to popular music, and is now available online. It covers popular music of all genres from 1990 to the present, which include jazz, country, folk, rap, reggae, techno, musicals and world music along with thousands of additional entries covering popular music genres, trends, styles, record labels, venues, and music festivals.

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New Chinese and Russian modules added along with pronunciation software to Oxford Language Dictionaries Online

Oxford Language Dictionaries Online is an online bilingual resource offering translations from and into English for over 4 million words, phrases and translations in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and now Chinese and Russian. New pronunciation software, which enables users to hear how words sound has also been added for all six language modules.

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Collexis Expert Profiling - personalised biomedical research management system

This online resource enables users to quickly identify experts within their institution as well as identify, locate and collaborate with other experts from around the world. Using the Collexis system, subscribing institutions can create expert profiles of investigators, researchers and departments to disseminate ground-breaking research and biomedical advances.

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