National eBooks Project

We’re taking part in a national project looking at the impact of eBooks on students’ learning. It’s called the JISC national e-books observatory project and runs until the end of 2008. The project gives us free access to 36 titles, selected to support students in business and management studies, engineering, media studies and medicine. See the titles here. They are core and recommended reading texts. The medical eBooks are available on the Books@Ovid platform and the rest are on the MyiLibrary platform. There will be OPAC records for the titles soon. 

The UK Statute Law Database

The UK Statute Law Database is the official revised version of the statute book for the UK in electronic form. ‘The statute book’ is a term we use to mean all the primary legislation of a public general nature in force at any particular time. SLD is published ‘by Authority’, which means that it is published with the authority of the Crown. Previously accessible only to a limited number of users in government, SLD was made publicly available online, free of charge, on 20 December 2006. 

Ebrary eBooks

We have a gigantic new collection of eBooks from Ebrary – 35,000 titles covering subjects from architecture to zoology. We’ve signed up to a two-year subscription to the top of the range Academic Complete collection. It includes a stream of new additions, unlimited multi-user access and the option of creating your own personal bookshelf. The books are organised into subject collections, which you could link to from your subject pages. The Ebrary Reader software, which is needed to view the books, has been installed on all the student PCs and most staff PCs. The collection can now be accessed through OPAC, found by adding ‘electronic books’ to your keyword search terms. 

House of Commons Parliamentary Papers

HCPP online unlocks 100 years of policy making, investigation, correspondence and reporting for researchers of all kinds. Microfiche for the twentieth century (104,902 papers, 5.2 million pages) was subsequently produced. Scanning continues, taking coverage right up to the latest parliamentary session. These scans have also been converted into digital format, and are presented in HCPP alongside index records. These are drawn from the HMSO General Alphabetical Indexes covering 1901 to 1979 and the Parliamentary On-Line Information Service (POLIS) database from 1979. POLIS became the Parliamentary Information Management Service (PIMS) in 2005. These indexes have been overlaid with broad subject categories based on the 19th century Subject Catalogue, updated for more recent material. Campus only access.

Words & Language Explained Visually

A new database, the Visual Thesaurus, claims to be “an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words” – this means that it explains the meanings of words by way of pictograms, showing related terms and concepts. More interestingly, perhaps, than the database, and word-search facility, is the series of articles accessible from VT’s front page: these concern many aspects of language, origin and use of words, and the practice of different kinds of writing. This should be a major resource for anyone involved with language and writing. The Visual Thesaurus is accessed via the A-Z Databases page, using linked passwords.