With my librarian’s hat on, the apparent incovenience of not being able to use Wikipedia for a day seemed, dare I say it, a little disproportionate. I wondered why it was that the students weren’t being encouraged to use the library’s reference materials, and why the ‘librarian’ set up to “ssssshhhh” the reporter wasn’t shown helping the students to get the information that they needed from quality, academically-appropriate resources.

I admit it. I use Wikipedia. But I only use this service when all other sources of information have failed me. For example, I might be watching a film and wonder where I’ve seen the supporting actor before. I can’t seem to find much information on the Internet Movies Database so I bung the name of the actor into Google and go to the Wikipedia entry for the actor. I used to work as a cataloguer for Intute and found Wikipedia incredibly useful to find birth and death dates for composers and musicians who were so ‘current’ that no reference source included them. More recently, I needed to learn about BBCode very, very quickly and Wikipedia came to my rescue.

However, as a librarian that’s where my Wikipedia usage stops. Why? Well, the thing about Wikipedia is that although the material listed is mostly accurate, there are glaring errors, and the credentials of the authors of the articles are not checked. So that very useful article on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity may not have been written by an expert in the field and therefore may not provide a solid basis for study. That’s where the library comes in useful. Here at Bolton, we have access to a wide range of electronic resources including reference sources that you can use to find background for your research. Don’t forget that a number of public libraries subscribe to online versions of important reference works such as the Encyclpaedia Britannica.

And that’s not all. There are times when subscribed-to services such as electronic journals and databases might not go far enought to enrich your research, and there are undoubtedly times where websites may be what you need to conduct your reserch. On each of the subject pages, you’ll find lists of websites that you may find  useful for research. These lists are by no means exhaustive, but have been selected on the quailty of the information available as well as the credentials of the creators. In addition, there are few multi-disciplinary sources that are a good starting point. One is Intute. Although no longer updated, Intute lists and describes website, all of which have been selected and scrutinsed by subject specialists. Another such service is Digital Librian, which like Intute, makes use of subject specialist.

Not all websites are created as equals. As clever as Google can be, it cannot determine the quality of the information presented by the website. For example, you might be doing some research on the rights of parents to request flexible working. You put some terms into the Google search box and take a look at your results. A beautifully referenced sixth-former’s project. A discussion on Mumsnet. A government White Paper. An annoymous essay written in 1998. Which do you pick? The third one. The first one may look good, but might not go into suffcient depth for the level of your research. The second may provide an insight into popular perceptions, but is not academically appropriate. The last one might be interesting but you will not be able to tell the credentials of the author, and the information may be very out of date. So what you need to think about when you are looking at a website is how old the website is (i.e. currency) if appropriate, who has written it (i.e. is there likely to be any bias) and why it has been written. Knowing how – and why - to assess websites is an important skill. Intute includes a number of online tutorials in the Virtual Training Suite for a wide variety of subjects that introduce not only important websites for that subject, but also presents a few tips and hints for making sure that you know how to find and appraise information available on the Internet.

Remember that during library opening hours, there is always a librarian available at the Subject Help Desk to help with research, so don’t be afraid of online resources, just come and talk to us!

There are currently some issues with accessing ScienceDirect, in that on-campus access requires you to take the same steps as off-campus access. This is part of a national problem that came to light last week and is being worked on by the supplier. At the moment, you will need to complete the following to access ScienceDirect both on-campus and off-campus:

1. Login to OpenAthens.
2. At the top right-hand corner of the screen, there is a “Login” link (the middle of the three links). Expand the cross next to the link.
3. Chose the “Go to Athens login” option underneath the login boxes.
4. On the following screen, you may be presented with a further set of options. Click the first link, “Athens login”. You should then be taken through to the service.

There has been no indication of when this problem may be resolved. If you have any problems accessing ScienceDirect (or any of our electronic resources) then don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Electronic Resources Librarian.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

It’s been a busy year. We’ve had the usual maintenance issues and problems with databases, and they have been some fairly major changes to some of our databases, some good, some not so welcome. However, we have also taken out subscriptions to a number of new databases which we hope you are already finding useful and that are going some way to enhancing our electronic collections.

I’d like to wish you all the very best for the festive season, and wish you all a happy, healthy and prosperous 2012.

Sarah, Electronic Resources Librarian

Logging into IHS databases (Engineer-it, Specify-it, OHSIS and Construction Information Service) has changed recently and in order to access these database, you may need to follow a couple of extra steps. After you have logged into OpenAthens, follow the links to the required database. You may then be presented with a screen that tells you to select where you are from. Find “University of Bolton” on the drop-down list You may then be presented with an additional University of Bolton login screen. Re-enter your network username and password and proceed to the resource. This appears to be rather inconsistent; in particular, you may not need to select the University of Bolton at any time during the logging in process.

Apologies for any inconvenienced caused.

The survey is available here and will be available until mid-January 2012.

- I would like maintenance and down-times properly communicated, so that all of our users know what to expect when they try to access electronic resources. I’ve already mentioned this morning that one of our resources will be subject to such maintenance over the weekend. So we’ve had enough notice, but there is nothing on the resource itself to let us know.

- I would like all resources to be accessed in the same way, both on- and off-campus, so that no matter where you are or what you are trying to access, you know exactly what to do. An end to my very lengthy access notes on the library website – wouldn’t that be great!?

- I would like all holdings to be completely and absolutely accurate at all times. The sheer volume of electronic research material available to us means that there are times when there are bound be inaccuracies – behind every resource there are humans, and human errors to happen – but it would be wonderful to think that if a resource says that we have access to the Journal of Brilliant Research from 1985 to 2009, that this is indeed the case…

And these are just a start. There are more – many, many more – but these are the main things that I think would really enhance our experience of using electronic resources. If I could get hold of a huge pot of money, there would probably be a million more!

As for what the Electronic Resources Librarian would really like for Christmas, with two children under five, a lie-in is all that my heart desires! That and maybe a couple of nice bundles of electronic journals…

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.