5 things to remember if using the Library this summer

Posted on June 2, 2023 by cstirling

The summer vacation period officially started this week! And while many of you are probably thinking the last thing you want to do is use the Library over the summer break, there will be a large number of students who will need to (or just want to) use the Library during the summer vacation period to continue with their studies or research.

So if you are one of the many who is planning on using Library facilities or services over the summer then read on. And for those of you who are not planning on doing this, we’d recommend you read on anyway (particularly if you have not returned books you have borrowed from the Library).

1) The Main Library and all our site libraries remain open throughout the summer vacation period.

Opening hours and staffed hours will be reduced in many libraries so check the opening hours website before you visit and follow the Library on social media for any updates – Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Continue reading →

Artificial Intelligence : where does it fit into library strategy?

Posted on April 26, 2023 by cloverodgers

Metal sign outside the Main Library, taken from a low angle at the bottom of the stairs. The word Library is spelled out in silver coloured letters mounted on a large stone wall.

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH CENTRAL CAMPUS, LIBRARY.

Everybody’s talking about AI and Chat GPT – what will they mean? I attended an event on 20.4.2023 organised by the Information School Sheffield University which explored this question for libraries.

Dr Andrew Cox introduced the session, reminding us that chatbots & AI have featured heavily in the news recently, and of course have existed in scifi for some time.

What might AI look like in the library?

From what we’ve learnt about AI it will have a wide and deep impact on library service and backend operations and library information literacy. We’ll see new features like library chatbots, text and datamining support and automation of systematic reviews. Knowledge discovery of collections will change, with a new paradigm of search : instead of giving a list of results, ChatGPT will give an answer. Users expectations of what a search looks like will change dramatically. There may be an impact on library jobs (although the decline of the librarian has been forecast for many years since the arrival of the internet, and librarians have evolved and thrived). Changes to the workforce will probably be complex and driven by sector.

Fundamentally we should remember that AI is only as good as the data it relies upon. Our library expertise in finding and managing data in a complex information landscape, and in determining the provenance and quality of data remains key. Also, libraries’ work in supporting sharing, openness and interoperability of data is vital as this data becomes available for AI to use.

Continue reading →

New to the Library: BFI Player

Posted on April 5, 2023 by cstirling

*The Library now has full 1 year access (until 30 Sept 2024) to BFI Player via a deal with JISC. You can access it from our Databases A-Z list, Film Studies databases list, Video Resources A-Z and DiscoverEd. Note if you already had a BFI Player account linked to our pilot subscription before 1 Oct 2023, you will need to relink your account following instructions given at the above access points.*

We are happy to let you know that the Library has a pilot subscription to the fabulous BFI Player, a video on demand service from the British Film Institute (BFI). Access is available to us until the end of August 2023.

BFI Player streams acclaimed, landmark and archived films. Reflecting the BFI’s wider cultural mission the focus is on British and European independent films but it does also include international releases. And it allows you to access classic and cult films from across the decades. Continue reading →

E-Resource trial: Skills for study

Posted on March 7, 2023 by lawlibrarian

As we’re midway through the second semester, many eyes are turning to assignments and thinking ahead to final exams. Did you know that we’ve recently secured a trial of the interactive resource Skills for Study?

Based on the bestselling The Study Skills Handbook by Stella Cottrell, Skills for Study offers an interactive and personalised solution to help students hone their academic skills while developing skills required by employers:

Confidence with Numbers	Getting Ready for Academic Study	Referencing and Understanding Plagiarism
Critical Thinking Skills	Group Work and Presentations	Research Principles
Employability and Personal Development	Projects, Dissertations and Reports	Time Management
Exam Skills	Reading and Note-making	Writing Skills

Each of the modules comes complete with exercises, activities, and module assessments along with supplementary videos, articles and blogs. We know how popular the Study Skills Handbook is for students from a range of disciplines, so here’s how to access this interactive resource:

Visit the Skills for Study website and sign in with your university login. You’ll be asked to register the first time you do, so follow the instructions on this student guide for single sign-on (pdf).

That’s it, it’s that easy! More information about the trial is available on the E-Resources trials page. Our trial ends on the 24th April so have a good look before then, and if you want to offer any comments on this or any of our other E-Resource trials then please consider filling in the trial feedback form.

Behind the Lens: LGBT+ History Month

Posted on February 23, 2023 by cstirling

February is LGBT+ History Month and this year’s theme is #BehindThe Lens. This aims to celebrate “LGBT+ peoples’ contribution to cinema and film from behind the lens. Directors, cinematographers, screen writers, producers, animators, costume designers, special effects, make up artists, lighting directors, musicians, choreographers and beyond.” (LGBT+ History Month, 2023)

To help you learn more we’ve pulled together just a small selection of Library resources that will allow you to start to look ‘Behind the Lens’.

Books and more books (we are a Library after all)
Films, TV, documentaries, etc.
Doing your own research

Books and more books (we are a Library after all)

Why not start with The Oxford handbook of queer cinema as an introduction. This hefty tome covers a wide variety of topics including silent and classical Hollywood films, European and American independent and art films, post-Stonewall and New Queer Cinema, global queer cinema and new queer voices and forms.

New queer cinema: A critical reader considers the filmmakers, the geography, and the audience of New Queer Cinema. While Queer cinema in Europe brings together case studies of key films and filmakers in this area. Sapphism on screen: Lesbian desire in French and Francophone cinema focuses even more specifically on films made by male and female directors working in France and other French-speaking parts of the world. In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives is the first full-length study of transgender representations in film but also art, fiction, video and music. Whereas LGBTQ film festivals: Curating queerness pays homage to the labour of queer organisers, critics and scholars. Continue reading →

Resolving to reference in 2023

Posted on January 24, 2023 by lawlibrarian

Digits for 2023 are written in black and stand against a purple city skyline. There is a ladder leaned against the 0, and a person who has climbed up and is using a telescope to look into the distance.

Image by RosZie on Pixabay

Whether you’re the type of person who makes New Years resolutions or not, we hope you’ll consider resolving to get comfortable with referencing this year. We have lots of resources available to help you with citations in your assignments, and we know it’s something many students struggle with and so can often leave to the end of their work. Some top tips for getting ahead of the referencing panic:

Record the information you read as you go. You can do this using a reference manager, bookmarking tools in your browser or DiscoverEd, or good old pen and paper. Whatever method you’re comfortable with, starting off with good organisation will help you down the line.
Leave more time than you think you’ll need. Do you usually give yourself a day or two before the assignment deadline to sort references? Double it! Triple it! Build in contingency time for writing up and correcting references – and for asking for help if you need it – and if you end up not needing all that time then submit early and then reward yourself with a treat for being ahead of the game!
Be consistent. There are lots of referencing styles out there (you may already be familiar with Harvard, APA, Chicago, OSCOLA), but whichever one you use for your work, be consistent in how you reference. Make sure you have all the component parts of each type of reference and then style them in the same way each time – this helps you spot when information is missing as well as looking good.
Use the tools available to you. This includes reference managers like Endnote, Zotero and Mendeley (or any others!), or even ‘quick’ citation engines like ZoteroBib or Cite This For Me. We highly recommend you use Cite Them Right Online which is a database we subscribe to for all staff and students to use – it will show you how to construct references for every type of material in a huge range of styles. Not sure how to reference a personal email, a blog post or a youtube clip? Use Cite Them Right to check! NOTE: Please make sure you check any reference that is created by a citation tool, as they are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Get help in plenty of time! Still feeling lost at sea? We’ve got training sessions on the MyEd booking system and also recordings on Media Hopper (click on ‘174 media’ below the title card for the full list of videos) designed specifically to help you. There’s also part of the LibSmart online information literacy course dedicated to the basics of referencing, and we have a whole subject guide on the topic. If all else fails, contact your Academic Support Librarian and ask for a one-to-one appointment where we can sit down with you and work through the problems you’re facing.

Do you have any top tips for referencing? We’d love to hear them, you can leave them in the comments or tweet us @EdUniLibraries.

E-Resources trials from the library

Posted on January 5, 2023 by lawlibrarian

Welcome back to all staff and students! This blog has been a bit quiet of late due to high workload and some understaffing in our team, but we wanted to start off the new year with some good news and thought we’d alert everyone to some of the excellent e-resource trials we have going on!

Did you know?
Before the library subscribes to a new database we often arrange for a trial free of charge and link them on the E-Resources Trials page. We then ask anyone who’s tested the resource out to fill in a short feedback form to let us know their thoughts so we can decide how useful it will be for our users. Some of the trials we have ongoing at the moment are listed below.

Several scientific flasks and beakers are placed in a line on a workbench. Each contain a different coloured liquid. The image conveys an experiment or trial.

Image by deepakrit on Pixabay

Radical Irish Newspaper Archives

Radical Irish Newspaper Archives is an extraordinary collection of over 115 Irish radical and political newspapers, journals, pamphlets and bulletins. Fully searchable and consisting of more than 11,000 editions with a total page count of 102,755 these newspapers, according to Dr Ciarán Reilly of Maynooth University, ‘hold the key to understanding Ireland in the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century’. Spanning one of the most important periods in Irish history, from the Home Rule debates of the 1880s to Ireland on the eve of the Second World War, these somewhat obscure titles provide an insight into a myriad of opinions on Irish life.

Trial access until: 08/01/2023 (so have a look this weekend!)

SAGE Research Methods: Doing Research Online

This new multimedia collection has been designed to support novice or experienced social science researchers who are conducting research online. Whether conducting their first or their hundredth study online, users will find support to employ a variety of digital methods from online surveys, interviews to digital ethnography, social media, and text analysis, as well as learn how to manage, store and archive digital data. Privacy and other ethical considerations specific to conducting research online are also covered. Researchers will also get support with how to navigate the challenges of being supervised online.

Content & Features:

‘How to Guides’ (providing practical help with using digital research methods);
Videos (tutorials, expert interviews, video case studies, etc.);
Case studies (focused on challenges of designing and conducting research online);
Teaching sets of data with a guide (suggesting a method to analyze both digitally created and existing online data, plus a step-by-step guide to how to do it so that students can practice data analysis);

Trial access until: 26/02/2023.

Archives of Sexuality and Gender: International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture

Archives of Sexuality and Gender: International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism and Culture examines diversity in underrepresented areas of the world such as southern Africa and Australia, highlighting cultural and social histories, struggles for rights and freedoms, explorations of sexuality, and organizations and key figures in LGBTQ history. It insures LGBTQ stories and experiences are preserved. Among many diverse and historical 20th century collections, materials include: the Papers of Simon Nkoli, a prominent South African anti-apartheid, gay and lesbian rights, and HIV/AIDS activist; Exit newspaper (formerly Link/Skakel), South Africa’s longest running monthly LGBTQ publication; Geographic Files, also known as “Lesbians in…” with coverage from Albania to Zimbabwe; and the largest available collection of digitized Australian LGBTQ periodicals.

NB The Library has purchased access to three other modules of the Archives of Sexuality and Gender database – these can be found on the A databases page.

Trial access until: 12/07/2023.

We actually have TWELVE trials currently running at the moment. You can find out more on the E-Resources Trials page of the library website, where we have links and descriptions for all items as well as a link to the feedback form (login required).

If there’s a resource you’d like us to get a quote and trial for, please let us know by contacting the relevant librarian for your subject area.

Have you heard about LibSmart?

Posted on October 21, 2022 by lawlibrarian

We’re midway through the first semester now, and many students will have settled into the routine of lectures, seminars and practical class preparation. You may even be thinking ahead to the end-of-module deadlines moving ever closer, and beginning to consider how to research and write assignments. For some students this can be stressful or confusing as they realise they don’t really know where to start with looking up resources to back up their work. Don’t panic though, we’ve got you!

Enter, LibSmart! This is our online information literacy course which you can access via Learn at any time throughout your studies. It’s self-enrol and open to absolutely everyone, and will provide you with a great grounding in how to access resources online and via the library, and how to reference your research correctly. There’s five modules in LibSmart I and although we recommend you work through them all, you can dip in and out of the bits you feel you need a bit of help with.

If you’ve completed that, you may find that you want to go a step further. In that case, check out LibSmart II which has ten modules on a variety of different topics all designed to help you get to grips with a specific focus. Unlike LibSmart I we don’t ask you to work through all the modules here, just pick ‘n’ mix your favourites! You might be interested in health information and systematic reviews, or legal information and government and policy research. Maybe you’re unsure of what’s in our Special Collections and you’d like to explore that more fully. Students who’ve completed these modules before have said that they’re extremely useful and relevant to their work.

If this sounds interesting to you, you can find out more on the LibSmart webpage. Remember you can access LibSmart any time you like throughout the year, and for each module you complete you get a digital badge!

There’s a video here on how to self-enrol in case you’re unsure of the steps. Hope to see you in LibSmart soon!

Welcome! Key library resources for 2022/23

Posted on October 8, 2022 by lawlibrarian

It’s been a bit quiet here on the ASL blog for the past couple of months and that’s because August and September are always spent preparing for the start of the new semester. Now that we’re well underway we’ve been busy doing inductions and welcome sessions to highlight some of our excellent services to new and returning students. In case you’ve missed any of the vital information we like you to have, here are some helpful links!

Library pages: You can find loads of helpful information about our services and library sites here. Look for opening hours, information on borrowing, and how to request resources here.

DiscoverEd: what we call a ‘library discovery tool’ is really what you might call the library catalogue. Look here for readings and research or just to explore the library collections! There’s a great guide on using DiscoverEd here. It’s a Microsoft Sway document but if you need a more accessible version please get in touch with us.

Resource Lists: online reading lists to help you find the core material for classes. Your course organisers have curated these to make sure you can easily access what you need. This link will take you to guides and videos for using Resource Lists too.

Library Subject Guides: these are curated pages of information that our team make up to help you with your studies. There are guides available for a huge range of subject areas and topics of interest.

LibSmart: this is our online information literacy course that you can enrol on any time throughout your time at University. We know not everyone comes to uni feeling confident about finding information, especially online, so this course has been built to guide you through some foundation skills. Follow the five modules in LibSmart I to help you get used to finding information and using the library’s collections, and dip in and out of LibSmart II’s modules on any subject that interests you!

These are just some of our top tips to help you get started during your time at the University of Edinburgh, but if you have questions at any time you can contact our team of librarians to help you get what you need. There’s a list of who deals with each subject on our website so please do get in touch, or leave us a comment on this post.

Check in with our blog regularly as we’ll be posting throughout the year about the upcoming Dissertation Festival, top features of LibSmart, new training sessions we offer, and much more!

Recordings of Lunchtime Seminars: Decolonising and Diversifying the Library

Posted on July 28, 2022 by lawlibrarian

Our recent post on Decolonising and Diversifying the Library introduced the short seminar series the ASL team ran during lunchtimes in July. We’re delighted to be able to follow up that post with the news that recordings of all three sessions have now been added to Media Hopper. Please use the links below to access the videos:

Diversity in First Year Scots Law Reading ListsSupporting Diversity using the ECA Artists Book and Zine Collections

Diversifying your Reading List from a Student Perspective

For more information on these sessions or if you have ideas for what you’d like to see in future lunchtime seminars, please contact us by email or leave us a comment.

Academic Support Librarians

Helping you get the best from the Library, its collections, resources and services

Category Archives: Online Library