InfosmART Workshop, Weds 11 November 2009

Need help on how to reference a source, write a bibliography, or set out an essay? Librarian Duncan Chappell will be providing a short session of the Library's InfosmART site TOMORROW WEDS 11 NOVEMBER 2009 AT 12.30 ON THE TOP FLOOR OF THE LIBRARY. InfosmART provides a set of easy-to-follow interactive modules in finding, evaluating and citing information. Hosted on the VLE, the InfosmART resource provides an easy one-stop shop for all your information skills needs. This workshop forms part of the Library's 20/20 workshop programme.

Google Search Blog

The University of Lincoln has just launched its new Google Searching Blog, full of tips and advice for getting the most out of Google.
Link: http://google.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/

Research Signposts

The National Archives has launched two new innovative online tools – ‘research signposts’ and two minute animated guides – to help researchers use the archives more effectively.
Link: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/gettingstarted/looking-for-person/default.htm

We Are Library. Hear Us Tweet!

The Library is now twittering! You can find all our updates in the form of tweets on our Twitter page. Our Twitter feed brings together all our updates, including new art and design resources, new architecture resources, new books in the library, information skills news, Flickr uploads, general library news, and VLE news.
Link: http://twitter.com/GSALibrary

Creative Commons Newsletter

Check out the latest Creative Commons Newsletter, available to download in PDF format and containing all the latest news in the Creative Commons arena.
Link: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCNewsletter

Now You Can Search Our Blogs

We've just added search functionality to all our blogs, allowing our readers to search for content across our blog postings, those of our friends, our external links, and links within blog posts. You'll find the search box in the sidebar menu.

Part-Time Researchers

Vitae has launched a series of resources for part-time researchers. The resources include a research report titled ‘Understanding the part-time researcher experience', a resource pack for training professionals and, perhaps of most interest to PGR Tips readers, a film offering tips and advice gathered from part-time researchers who have successfully completed their doctorate.

Link: http://vitae.ac.uk/policy-practice/95563/Part-time-researcher-film.html

Library Launches Information Skills Resource for the GSA Community

InfosmART is the GSA Library’s online interactive course in information and research skills. If you have ever struggled with writing bibliographies, conducting literature reviews, finding information, or referencing sources, then InfosmART is for you!

• Learn how to select your sources and define your keywords.
• Learn how to search your sources quickly and effectively.
• Learn how to evaluate the information you find for currency, relevance, accuracy and methodology.
• Learn how to cite the information you find as references and bibliographies in your own work.

You can find InfosmART under Students Services or Staff Services on the VLE.
Link: http://vle.gsa.ac.uk

Liverpool Archives

This website documents an AHRC-funded collaboration between the University of Liverpool’s School of History and the Liverpool Record Office to computerise the city’s unique local studies sheaf catalogue and create resource finding guides, essays and commentaries around the most important historical writing about Liverpool. These are available online (as will the catalogue be, on its completion in 2009) and cover seven different topics: Archive Sources – introductions to conducting research in the record office; Culture; Maritime and port history, including shipping companies, emigration and the slave trade; Politics; Society; Urban history, building and planning, including the city’s architecture; Work, business and the economy. The project builds on the 2006 publication ‘Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History’. This website is a very useful resource for anyone embarking on the study of the city of Liverpool.
Link: http://tinyurl.com/d74lo2

Copyright History

This website is “a digital archive of primary sources on copyright from the invention of the printing press (c. 1450) to the Berne Convention (1886) and beyond”. Funded by the AHRC, this ambitious and extensive database includes digital images and commentary for key texts in the evolution of intellectual property law pertaining to five modern jurisdictions: Britain, Germany, France, Italy, the United States. Documents include “privileges, statutes, judicial decisions, contracts and materials relating to legislative history” as well as “contemporary letters, essays, treatises and artefacts”.
Link: http://www.copyrighthistory.org/

Guardian Data Store

The Guardian newspaper has just launched its free Data Store. It provides access to the top sets of publicly-available data for you to use free. Explore the links, visualise the data and mash it together with other application.
Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/data-store

Similar Images Search in Google

Google has just launched its Similar Images search function, which is currently available in Google Labs. The service allows you to search for images that are similar to one another in terms of qualities such as shape, composition and colour. It uses a mathematical algorithm to find similar images based on intrinsic visual content, rather than on the keywords people have used to describe their images.
Link: http://similar-images.googlelabs.com

TagBulb Image Search

TagBulb is a search engine that scans image and video sharing sites. Just enter the target for your search, click the button and the results are almost instantaneous.
Link: http://tagbulb.com/

YouTube Education

This is a special section of YouTube which contains a directory of videos, film clips and channels from universities, colleges and higher education establishments worldwide. They include examples of lectures, events and course related materials covering all areas of the sciences, social sciences and humanities. It is possible to search the site by keyword, to browse by college name or to filter by country. Copyright and technical information is displayed on the website.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/edu

Wikipedia in Simple English

Simple English Wikipedia is not unlike Wikipedia the free encyclopedia which is collaboratively written by volunteers across the world. What makes Simple English Wikipedia different is that all the articles are created in Plain English and only uses simple English words and grammar. The Simple English Wikipedia is a very inclusive alternative to Wikipedia and can be a great resource for children and adults who are learning English. There are currently some 55,155 articles on the Simple English Wikipedia.
Link: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
via: http://scottish-rscs.org.uk/newsfeed/?p=4111

RevIMG

This search engines allows you to upload or point to an existing image, and then find other images that look similar. This site remains in development.
Link: http://www.revimg.net/index.php

Kalooga

Kalooga is an image search engine that will search galleries of images for you, rather than single items. The advantage is that you can get access to a broader but relevant collection of images.

Link: http://www.kalooga.nl/

Jurn

Jurn is a new Google ’custom search engine’ for searching the content of free, full-text, academic e-journals listed on the website Intute Arts and Humanities website. Intute is an online service providing access to quality web resources, selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists, and Jurn has been created by one of their contributors. The 951 journals mostly cover the areas of art, media, film, literature, cultural studies, plus cultural history and design, and they can be searched by keyword.
Link: http://www.jurn.org/

EU Blogs

The EU has just launched a new portal for EU political blogs.
Link: http://www.bloggingportal.eu/

BBC News Radar

The BBC News Radar displays a list of recently published stories from any section of the BBC News web site. It displays both stories that have just been published for the first time and stories that have been recently updated.
Link: http://radar.journalismlabs.com/radar-0.1/

Video and Audio Media in Qualitative Research

Don Radcliffe, an academic from Wheaton College in the USA, describes this site as "a working draft of a booklet on conducting qualitative research using a camcorder". He specifically studied the social groupings of children in Georgia. His work is tightly connected to visual anthropology and his results yielded a publication by the American Psychological Association in 2003. Although specifically covering psychological research, this should be of interest to all researchers considering using video and audio data collection methods.
Link: http://qualitativeresearch.ratcliffs.net/video.htm

Six Ways to Use TicTocs

The TicTocs service, which provides free tables of contents for journals, has just published this handy guide on tips and hints for staying on top of published articles.
Link: http://tinyurl.com/by9nlj
Accces: Free

Digital Research Tools

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct more efficient research. Digital Research Tools provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools and how they might be employed most effectively by researchers. From a statistics and data perspective tools and software are available to download in order to: analyse data; collect data, convert/manipulate files; find research materials; mine data; perform qualitative data analysis; visualise data. Users are required to register.

Link: http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/

Access: free registration required

Journal Content on Wikipedia

An academic journal has introduced a requirement that academics post their research findings on Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia that anyone may edit.
In a drive to broaden access to research and to improve the quality of information available on Wikipedia, the journal RNA Biology has asked authors whose papers are accepted for publication to add their results to Wikipedia.
From Times Higher Education.

Journals in Google Book Search

Google has just started to add magazine and journal content to Google Book Search. Now when you search on Google Book you'll be searching across the full text of both books and an ever-growing number of magazines, which will appear tagged with the keyword "Magazine" in the search results.
Link: http://books.google.com/