New library catalogue

Summer is a busy time for academic libraries! We've been able to implement a new library management system (behind the scenes system that should improve our efficiency and record-keeping) which comes along with a shiny new library catalogue. Visitors to the ILS homepage should have seen it and used it already but for those of you who haven't, here is a little snapshot:

Isn't it great? You should see improved relevance with books ranked highest in your list of results. Quite a few graduate researchers spent a good chunk of time with us, working out some of the bugs and optimising the look and feel in May of this year, so thanks very much to you for that. For those of you who miss Discover and want to keep searching there, you can still find it from the 'Databases' page, which is linked to from the ILS homepage.

At the moment, we're still working on a few aspects relating to article search (or 'search everything' as it appears in the catalogue). You may well find that the catalogue is not a great place for you to look for articles, and in that case, we would encourage you to go to straight to your discipline-specific scholarly databases. Though there are some advantages of searching with a federated search tool like our catalogue (looking across disciplinary lines, saving a bit of time by searching from all providers at once), there are many more advantages of searching in the correct databases. You will get much more precise search results and be able to search in discipline-appropriate ways; things that can be eroded when databases are merged into one interface.

Search strategies and high-quality databases are just the type of thing that make your academic liaison librarian's eyes glow with joy. Please book a tutorial  if you'd like to make sure you're getting the most out of the resources we subscribe to.

Masculinity in Literature

In an effort to bring added value to their scholarly articles, Routledge have created a cross-journal collection of articles which address 'masculinity in literature'. The publisher describes it thus:

This collection looks at the construction of manhood alongside sexual orientation, race and class, and within specific historical situations. The featured articles explore a range of media, regions and time periods as the authors contend with the concept of masculinity and how it has been defined in popular culture.

 All articles in the collection are free to access until October 2015 and might be of interest to those of you whose research addresses gender. Enjoy!

Open access and institutional repository requirements

HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) recently announced changes regarding deposit of research outputs for eligibility in the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) excercise in 2020.

Rest assured, however, that YSJ's policy on depositing in RaY has not changed!

Google Scholar Button for your browser

Looking up a highlighted citation with the Google Scholar button

In April of 2015, Google released a Google Scholar plug-in for an internet browser. After a few months of testing, I think it seems stable and useful for looking up citations without necessarily needing to leave the webpage you're currently looking at or opening a new tab.

If you decide to install the button in your browser, you should be able to highlight text on a page (either a citation in an online bibliography or text from an actual article), click the button and instantly see where the full text might be available open access or via the library. Scholar is far from failsafe when checking our collections, so if it doesn't find it at YSJ, it's always best to double check from the library's website (or with your librarian) whether we may have the item in our collection.

Looking up a highlighted quote the Google Scholar button

You can also type into the button a snippet of text from an article or book you'd like to cite, and then see results of articles where those words appear. This might be useful if you handwrite a quote into a notebook but fail to take the full citation at the time (not that any YSJ scholar would fall prey to such bad habits).


The browser button is available for Chrome and Firefox. Happy searching!