In this issue
- Welcome message
- Going beyond Journal articles and E-books
- Resource News - Adam Matthew Collection, Gale Reference Complete, Project Muse and Historical Texts
Welcome to the Spring issue of the Online Library Newsletter – and a very warm welcome to those on the BSc Computer Science and MSc Supply Chain Management programmes who joined us recently. We are here to help you get the most out of the Online Library, so please contact us when you need assistance. You can find contact details at the end of this newsletter.
Congratulations to all postgraduate students who managed to meet the March deadline for submitting your dissertation. You should be feeling very pleased with yourself! But if you haven’t – and as distance learners we know all sorts of commitments can get in the way of study- keep going until you get to the finishing line.
Many of you will be preparing for exams in the coming weeks. We know that time can be tight and exam stress can hold you back. So if you are struggling to find or access study materials or need advice on Library-related matters, seek advice from us.
Book requests Have you requested an e-book? If so, you will have been contacted by us to inform you that your book is now in the Online Library. Thanks to everyone who has suggested books for the Online Library so far.
Online Library survey Thanks to everyone who took part in the Library survey. The survey helps us to discover what you think of the Online Library and what we should be doing to make it better. The good news is that 63% of you agree that Online Library resources meet your study requirements. The Prize Draw winners received Amazon vouchers and were from Singapore, the UK and Argentina studying on the EMFSS, Postgraduate Laws, and Petroleum Geoscience programmes respectively.
New, improved…
We have been working over the past year to make improvements to your Library. Here are some of our key achievements:
- More e-books. 830 of them!
- We’ve answered even more of your enquiries-increase of 21.37%!
- Ask-a-Librarian Live Chat extended: you now can chat to us online all week from Monday-Friday
- One-stop search: you can retrieve your key e-texts books and e-journal articles in a single search (don’t have to search the Dawson’s e-book platform separately.
Online Library Project: Instant access to the Online Library Librarians are working on a new authentication project which will completely transform your library experience by automatically giving you access to Library resources using the same portal/VLE username, including access to e-books. We will keep you informed about these developments.
Have you been using the Online Library? If you use the Online Library you are more likely to achieve better assignment and exam results, and we have the stats to prove it! Here are the current Top Ten Library users by study programme:
1. Refugee Studies
2. Human Rights
3. Global Diplomacy
4. Professional Accountancy
5. History
6. Applied Educational Leadership and Management
7. CIS
8. Royal Holloway MBA
9. LLM
10. Information Security
Going beyond Journal articles and E-books
The Online Library provides access to a large number of journal articles and nearly 2000 E-books. These resources are discoverable using Summon which cross searches all the individual databases. However in addition to this the Online Library provides access to other information sources such as dissertations, statistics and newspapers. Using these sources can enhance your work, for example newspapers can be used as primary sources for historical and current events and relevant dissertations in your subject area can help you refine your research question. More information about some of our specialist databases is given below.
European Newstream
Available on all Study Programme gateways, this database covers Local, regional and national newspapers including The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times, and the Times Education Supplement. It also includes Irish and European news content with archives going back to the 1990s. Substantial backfiles are also available for most newspapers, providing full text access to the articles, columns, editorials, and features published in each. European newstream is part of the Proquest platform so it should look familiar if you have used other Proquest databases such as ABI/Inform.
Click on the Publications tab to view an alphabetical list of what is available.
Access this database using your Athens or Portal username and password.
Statista
Statista is an excellent resource for researching quantitative data, statistics and related information. It has statistics on a broad range of topics, including many industries and countries. Statista also provides a variety of reports and dossiers about more than 1000 topics. These include all top statistics on a specific topic compiled by experts, and they are regularly updated with new forecasts. Statista is particularly useful for the Professional Accountancy Strategic Finanical Project. The database is available on the following study programme gateways : Cedep, Cefims, EMFSS, Global MBA, International Management, Supply Change Management and Professional Accountancy.
Check out the infographics section for complex information presented visually.
Access using your Athens username and password
Proquest dissertations (Global)
Explore a wide range of original research by using the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global database. This database is the world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses from around the world, spanning from 1743 to the present day and offering full text for graduate works added since 1997. Selected full text is also available for works written prior to 1997. Subjects covered include Business and Economics, Medical Sciences, Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities. You can start searching from the basic search box on the home page though advanced searching is available. Where applicable Audio, video, survey instruments and other types of digital files are included along with the full text.
If you are writing a dissertation or other research project exploring this database can help you to discover new information resources for your topic by looking at literature reviews and bibliographies of dissertations in your subject area .
This database is available on all Postgraduate course gateways and many Undergradate ones.
Access the database with your Athens account or Portal username and password
Resource News
Adam Matthew Collections
A significant addition to the resources available to History students are several collections from Adam Matthew Digital. Adam Matthew is a digital publisher of unique primary source collections from archives around the world. Althought they are most relevant to History we have also added these to other gateways. For example the Defining Gender collection is also useful to English and Education students.
Resources from Adam Matthew are discoverable using Summon, but you will probably want to explore the individual collections to get an overview of what is available. The collections are organised by theme. Each collection has a tour of what is included.
Below is a brief description of the collections
Defining Gender - Original primary source material from British archives that explores the study of gender. This is a useful resource for History, English and Education students.
Global Commodities - Original visual, manuscript and printed materials that explore the history of these key commodities: Chocolate, Coffee, Cotton, Fur, Opium, Oil, Porcelain, Silver, Gold, Spices, Sugar, Tea, Timber, Tobacco, Wheat, Wine and Spirits.
Mass observation online - Between 1937 and the mid-50s, the Mass Observation organisation tried to capture the everyday life of ordinary Britons through questionnaires and collections of diaries. In this database, you can search the original sources as well as reports published by the organisation.
Migration to new worlds - The collection presents the personal stories and first-hand accounts of migrants during the 19th and 20th Centuries through letter collections, travel journals and oral histories.
Slavery, abolition and social justice - thousands of original manuscripts, pamphlets, books, paintings and maps from between 1490 and 2007 which explore slavery and the abolitionist movement.
Victorian popular culture - photographs, books, pamphlets, posters and more exploring 4 areas of Victorian popular culture: spiritualism, circuses, music hall and moving pictures.
Women in the national archives - resources from the British National Archives that are relevant to women's studies, and original documents on the suffrage question in Britain, the Empire and colonial territories.
Gale Reference Complete
The Online Library now provides access to Gale Reference Complete, an enormous package of reference materials from Gale, a renowned publisher with over 60 years of experience. Gale Reference Complete contains both primary and secondary sources, including 28,000 periodicals, 1,700 e-books (including encyclopaedias), 13 million pages of historical primary sources and 1.5 million items of literature criticism and full-text literary works. You will be able to find many of these items in Summon search.
When you log in from the Gale Reference Complete page on the Online Library website, you will notice a list of the Gale databases you can access. Each database has a different specialisation, and you’ll easily be able to see the variety of materials you can read. For example, one database contains newspapers from the 17th and 18th Centuries; another database contains millions of peer-reviewed scholarly materials; another database contains primary sources chronicling the development of gender and sexuality since the 16th Century.
You can select some of the databases you want to search across. However, because the materials are so diverse, you cannot search across all of the Gale databases in one search. This means that if you are looking for a specific type of material, it might be a good idea to look at the database descriptions and then search within the individual databases which look promising.
English students will notice a link on their gateway to ‘Gale Literature Databases’. This collection of databases specialises in literature, including databases that contain essays on the lives and works of authors from all time periods, commentary and criticism, and the full text of hundreds of thousands of poems, short stories and plays.
Because of the wide range of topics and disciplines that the materials cover, Gale Reference Complete is an invaluable resource for students on all courses. Make sure you make the most of this wealth of knowledge!
Other resources added in last academic year:
Project MUSE
Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content. It currently includes 468,570 articles and 1,177,319 chapters by 265 publishers, on a wide variety of topics including education, history, literature, medicine, philosophy, economics, politics and technology. Access using your portal username and password.
Historical Texts
Historical Texts contains over 400,000 texts from the 15th to the 19th Centuries. The texts are in three historically significant collections: Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and 65,000 texts from the British Library 19th Century collection. Access with your Athens account or your Portal username and password.
If you need further help using the Online Library you can contact us by :
Email: OnlineLibrary@london.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7862 8478
Ask a Librarian Live Chat (Monday-Friday, 09:30-12:30 and 13:30-16:30 UK time)
We aim to respond to your enquiry within 72 hours. When you contact us, please include your 9-digit student number (also known as your SRN) because this will help us verify that you are a registered student
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