Resource announcements

February 2010

JISC Digital Media service

Posted: Wednesday 10 February 2010

If you need help with using digital media in teaching and learning then JISC Digital Media is a free service which provides advice, guidance and training to the UK's Further and Higher Education community on:

  • Creating digital media resources - specifically still images, moving images and sound resources.
  • Delivering digital media resources to users.
  • Using digital media resources to support teaching, learning and research.
  • Managing both small and large scale digitisation projects.

JISC Digital Media is a JISC Advance service and is hosted at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol.

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JSTOR Data for Research beta service

Posted: Wednesday 10 February 2010

The Data for Research (DfR) tool was designed by JSTOR to support the data mining needs of the research community.  The tool allows users to:

  • Conduct full-text and fielded searching of the entire JSTOR archive using a powerful faceted search interface.
  • Quickly and easily define content of interest through an iterative process of searching and results filtering.
  • View document-level data including word frequencies, citations, and key terms.
  • Request and download datasets associated with the content selected.

The journal content on the beta site is updated 1-2 weeks after each content release on the main JSTOR site.

JSTOR are keen to receive feedback on the functionality of the beta version of DfR and have created a special feedback form linked to from all the pages of the DfR site.

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NewsFilm Online Service Update

Posted: Wednesday 10 February 2010

NewsFilm Online now allows users to comment on the news items in the service and read comments submitted by other users.  The new commenting feature is accessible via a tab at the top of the redesigned "full record" search result page.

NewsFilm Online gives access to over 3,000 hours of digitised television news and cinema newsreels taken from the ITN/Reuters archive. There are over 50,000 clips which can be viewed online or downloaded and additional resources including running orders and scripts, images, and background information on news footage.

NewsFilm Online can be accessed via MetaLib.

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Archival Sound Recordings new releases

Posted: Wednesday 10 February 2010

A new set of rare, unpublished and previously unavailable recordings have been launched online as part of the British Library‘s Archival Sound Recordings project.

Highlights include:

  • Traditional music in England – including popular ballads, children's skipping songs, music hall, soldiers' songs and folk tales recorded in a range of environments from pubs to musicians‘ homes and radio studios.
  • Music in India – devotional songs, Vaishnava prayers, Buddhist ritual music and healing songs from remote rural areas of India.
  • George Kingsley Roth Fiji Collection – this collection includes the sounds of dance gongs, stamping tubes, nose flutes and songs from the islands of Fiji and Tonga.
  • Decca West Africa Recordings – encompassing a wide range of popular genres including highlife, rumba, calypso, blues and early Nigerian jùjú.

With the addition of the new material Archival Sound Recordings now includes 28,000 recordings covering 2,000 hours of sound, all freely available to UK HE institutions.  The recordings are grouped into eight collections covering:

  • Accents and dialects
  • Arts, literature and performance
  • Classical music
  • Environment and nature
  • Jazz and popular music
  • Oral history
  • Sound recording history
  • World and traditional music

Archival Sound Recordings can be accessed via MetaLib.

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NextBio on ScienceDirect

Posted: Wednesday 10 February 2010

With the recent integration of NextBio on ScienceDirect users can now access enriched content in the fields of life sciences, health sciences and chemistry.

NextBio uses a set of ontology-based semantic tools which allow for text mining of both ScienceDirect content and approved publicly available research data from PubMed, clinical trials, experimental data correlations, and news articles.

After performing a search on ScienceDirect:

  • The search terms and keywords from the selected article or book chapter (published from 1995 and excluding Major Reference Works) are matched against NextBio’s biomedical ontologies
  • The application is displayed on the right-hand side of the article page with the key terms found in the selected article or book chapter.
  • Selecting any of these terms opens NextBio and allows for further exploration of the subject based on the trustworthy and publicly available sources collected and compiled by NextBio, alongside additional ScienceDirect literature.

For further information please see the NextBio page on ScienceDirect Info.

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COPAC enhancements

Posted: Wednesday 10 February 2010

COPAC is a library catalogue giving free access to details of the holdings of many major UK and Irish academic libraries plus the UK National Libraries and a number of special collections in a range of other institutions.

Recent developments to the service include:

  • Table-of-contents information in many journal and some book records.
  • The option to export records directly into EndNote and Zotero.
  • A login option giving access to a personal Search History and 'My References' list both of which can be tagged, annotated, and developed over time.

Access COPAC at http://copac.ac.uk/ or via MetaLib.

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