Researcher support workshops from ILS

Researcher support sessions from ILS have now been scheduled through to next Spring. Workshops on Word for long documents, the YSJ research repository, open access, tools for keeping track of reading and much more on offer. Hope to see you there!

Electronic delivery of articles and book chapters through the Inter-Library Loans Service

The British Library are now offering the electronic delivery of Inter-Library Loans, and we are implementing the service at York St John in the coming months. Unless you've signed up for the pilot scheme (more on that below), you won't notice any changes yet but will before the end of the year. Our colleague in inter-library loans, Katherine Hughes, has highlighted below some aspects of the new service that will be of interest to researchers.

How do electronic inter-library loans work?

Participants in our pilot scheme, running at the moment and open to staff and PhD students, can receive electronic ILLs. To receive ILLs electronically, you will need to sign up for an account with the British Library. This is a quick process taking around five minutes. You can then order ILLs via the form on the library website, and will receive an email to your university email account with a link to download the article. Once you’ve downloaded the PDF, you will just need to sign in with your new British Library account details to access the article. For PCs and some other devices, it’s possible to ‘remember me on this computer’, so you only have to log in the first time you download an article to that device.

If you’re interested in taking part in the pilot scheme, please email interlibrary@yorksj.ac.uk and the Inter-Library Loans staff will register you for the scheme and send you more information.

What are the advantages of electronic ILLs?

• They’re faster – in the majority of cases, receiving ILLs electronically is much quicker than getting a paper copy. The British Library will send the link to the article directly to you rather than having to wait for it to be printed or posted. Where the item you’ve requested is available electronically at the British Library, they can send it to you very rapidly, within a day or two of your request being placed. Other articles might take a little longer, but are still likely to be sent to you within a working week.
• You can keep multiple copies of the file on multiple devices– It’s possible to save multiple copies of the file onto different devices. The DRM (Digital Rights Management) software on the PDF means that only you can log on to view it, but it doesn’t stop you from making copies.
• You can still print the article – it’s possible to print the article out once while maintaining multiple electronic copies.

Are all items available via electronic ILL?

Electronic ILL is available on any journal article and book chapter requests ordered through the British Library, where we get the majority of our ILLs. It’s not currently available on books, which need to be borrowed on loan.

Sometimes, we are unable to acquire specific items from the British Library and instead need to order them through another university library. Some libraries will only be able to supply the copy in print format, but where possible, we will send these items to you electronically. When available electronically from another library, we will usually be able to send an unencrypted PDF so there will be no need to log in. If only available in print, we will provide a paper copy via your preferred method, collection or postal delivery. Please indicate when completing the ILL form which delivery method you would prefer if the item is unavailable electronically.

New ebook packages

ILS has recently purchased some ebook packages from Palgrave, to enhance our holdings in the areas of Religion and Philosophy, Social Sciences, Education, Literature, and Media and Culture.  Our systems team has been hard at work making these titles searchable in the library catalogue, and you can also can see what is available and access the books at

• http://capitadiscovery.co.uk/yorksj/items/110904  
• 
  
• Any titles which are in the packages we have bought are available to download in full as a PDF, or to send to a Kindle, as well as having a read online option.  We hope these are helpful to you in your research.

ILS at the YSJ Research Reflections conference

Armed with flyers and complimentary, branded beer mats, academic liaison librarians will be available to chat with you during the refreshments breaks at the ILS stand hosted by the YSJ Research Reflections conference this week. We're interested in hearing about your research directions and will have our laptops at the ready for telling you more about how ILS can support your research.

Clare, Liaison Librarian to the Faculty of Education and Theology will be representing ILS' own research excellence with her poster entitled 'Communities of Practice in Information Literacy in Higher Education'. See you there!

New collection available - Historical Texts

Does your research involve accessing texts from 15th-19th Centuries?  If so, our new collection may be just what you need.  ILS has purchased access to the Jisc Historical Texts platform.  This provides YSJ members with access to the following services.

Early English Books Online (EEBO), covering the time period 1473-1700 and over 125000 books.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), covering the time period 1701-1800 and over 180000 titles.

British Library 19th Century collection, covering the time period 1789-1914 and over 65000 digitised editions (more than 25 million pages).

Jisc has produced some introductory materials, if you would like to find out more.

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!