Keeping track of your reading

We will be running a drop in session on Wednesday describing some tools for keeping track of your reading. We'll be talking about keeping track of what you have already read, what you'd like to read, and how to stay on top of relevant authors and topics as they're published. Please come by DG103 at 10:00 if you would like to join in.

More on what we've covered in the past can be found here.

For those of you who haven't attended the ILS researcher support sessions, we usually spend about 30 minutes talking about some tools or strategies we recommend based on the needs of researchers in the room. We'll stick around for another 30 minutes afterwards in case there are individual questions about your research or if you'd like to get stuck in with the tools we've demoed. The full roster of workshops is available in the Google calendar on the right of your screen or here.

Newspaper archives - what is available here?

Increasingly researchers are able to use online archives of newspapers, recent and more historic, as part of their resource searches.  Having recently added some new services to our portfolio in ILS, we thought it was worth rounding up what is now available to you. All of these are accessible via the databases page on the ILS website.

17th-18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers

The newspapers, pamphlets and books gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) represent the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English news media.

19th Century British Library Newspapers

19th Century British Library Newspapers contains full runs of influential national and regional newspapers, representing different political and cultural segments.

British Newspapers 1600-1900

A combined search tool for the two collections above.

FT.com

FT.com interative provides access to the full text of the global editions of the Financial Times to search and browse the archives, including interactive features and extra reports on industry sectors and companies.

Historical Newspapers

Searchable full text, full page, and article-level images from the archives of The Guardian, The Observer and The New York Times, 1791-2003.

InfoTrac Custom Newspapers

Full text, up to the present day, of UK newspapers, including The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent.

UK Press Online (ON CAMPUS ACCESS ONLY)

A British tabloid newspaper archive, covering the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Star and other major titles.

Posting to Academia.edu & ResearchGate

It's been a while since we've talked about either ResearchGate or Academia.edu, though we know many of you use these services, both as readers and contributers (we do too). If you haven't yet stumbled across these two, they are online platforms on which researchers can post their papers. Academia.edu tends to be more humanities-focussed and is based in San Francisco and ResearchGate tends to be more STEM-focussed and is based in Berlin, but both of them host papers from all over the world and across all disciplines. These platforms position themselves somewhere between a research repository (other examples would be YSJ's RaY, SSRN, or arXiv) and a social networking site like LinkedIn or Facebook.

Though these services give users the ability to publicize and download articles without paying a subscription or article charge, they're not providing open access in a responsible, sustainable manner.  As we pointed out before, these platforms are owned by private companies and their goal is to create good financial returns for their investors. Mendeley, a socially-oriented citation management service, was purchased by Elsevier a few years back, and so it's possible that ResearchGate and Academia.edu will be sold to a similar (or the same) buyer in future. Another likely scenario is that they will sell onwards to marketers or R&D companies information about networks, research trends and other data you upload.

Providing open access to your research outputs is best practice, as well as making you compliant for the next REF. There are a number of accepted methods of making your work open access --YSJ's policy is to upload them to RaY -- but uploading to ResearchGate and Academia.edu are not acceptable for REF. You can continue to upload to either or both platforms, just remember to upload to RaY as well.

If you're interested in reading up on this, this blog posting by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, is a good place to start.

Focus on Box of Broadcasts

Did you know that we have access to a large archive of television and radio programmes via our subscription to Box of Broadcasts?  And that they come with complete transcripts?

It can be tempting to use our ILS database list just when we need journal or newspaper articles, but there are tools which provide access to lots of other types of resources too.  One of the most useful is this tool, which provides an archive of Freeview channels, including some in other languages.  If you teach classes, you may be able to find a good film or television programme to use.  Or you may be interested in analysing news programmes for their coverage of a specific event or policy.  Further to this, it offers the chance to create clips of part of a programme, or playlists of clips or whole programmes.

If you would like to explore this further, Box of Broadcasts is on the ILS databases page.

Celebrate open access week by retaining your copyright

It’s Open Access Week and here in ILS we’ve been discussing the merits of licensing your research when you upload it to an institutional or subject repository, such as RaY.

Creative Commons licences are a straightforward way of making your work available for others to utilise,. There are six licences with different conditions attached. The most permissive licence, CC BY, allows anybody to copy and use your work, including for commercial purposes, so long as they credit you as the owner. The most restrictive licence is CC BY-NC-ND, which only allows others to download and share your work, so long as they credit you.

Copyright is a crucial factor when it comes to making your work open access. Uploading your work to a repository is an act of copying. If you haven’t retained the copyright in the work, for example when you signed a publishing agreement, then you will need permission to do this. Permission can be in the form of written agreement from the copyright owner, or a licence which allows you to make that work available.

In ILS we encourage all researchers to retain the copyright in their work whenever possible to do so – do not be afraid to negotiate your publishing terms!

If you don’t own the copyright to your work and you would like to make it available under licence, then again you will require permission to do this.

Different funding bodies have different requirements regarding licences. For more information about these requirements, and using a licence for your work, see our Guide to RaY and Open Access. For more information about copyright, see our copyright webpages.

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.