Vacation borrowing @ CSL

Vacation borrowing for undergraduates with borrowing rights at the CSL (3rd year and above) is now in operation.

All books borrowed will now be due back 15th January 2010.

See our Reader Services section on the CSL website for further information regarding borrowing.

Library Survey

The Central Science Library is always keen to improve our service and to that end we are currently conducting a survey of our users.

We are committed to improving your library services. Better understanding your expectations will help us tailor those services to your needs.

We are conducting this survey to measure library service quality and identify best practices through the Association of Research Libraries' LibQUAL program.

Please answer all items. The survey will take about 10 minutes to complete. Thank you for your participation!

Please click here to take the survey and be in with a chance of winning an iPod Shuffle or 1 of 5 £10 Amazon vouchers.

Scopus Training 5th of November 10.30 Issac Newton Institute

Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of research literature
and quality web sources and is aimed at the scientfic researcher.
This session is aimed at graduate students and staff who want to learn how
to use Scopus to both locate research in their area and to manage their
research output.

Places are limited so please email Yvonne Nobis (yn235@cam.ac.uk) if you are interested in attending.

Workshop: How to get published

Author workshop held by BioMed Central and PLoS Public Library of Science

This Author workshop is aimed at young scientists and provides guidelines on how to write a 4* research paper with these Open Access publishers.

Wednesday, 21st October, 10.00 - 12.30, University Centre. Please notify Barbara Bultmann (bb342@cam.ac.uk) if you wish to attend.

Publishing Workshop

International publishing

With the aim to support young scientists in their academic career, a lecture on Scientific Publishing will be given on 19 October 2009 under the title: How to write a world class paper.

During the presentation, the audience will gain insights in the way publishers, editors and reviewers look at their manuscripts, which may help to better submit papers.

The lecture will cover those aspects, relevant when preparing and submitting a manuscript for a scientific journal e.g. originality, Hot Topics, format of the article, selection of the journal, language, building blocks, ethical and copyright issues.

Dr Riaz Agha, Managing and Executive Editor of International Journal of Surgery (and Junior Doctor here in Addenbrooke's!) will present the workshop and share his experiences with the audience and answer questions.

The meeting is relevant for young scientists of all subjects; however, the accent will be on publishing in Science, Technology and Medicine (STM).

How can you attend?
Owing to limited capacity we are running this session twice 10.30am and 2pm.
We ask that you register to attend. Please register from this page.
Booking will close on Monday 12th October.

Access to electronic resources off-campus with a Raven password important changes from 1 August 2009

Access to subscription electronic resources, including ejournals, ebooks and online databases, is available off-campus to current staff and students of the university and is controlled by Raven ID and password.

Your Raven ID and password may be used off campus wherever you are prompted to log in using one of the following links:

• Shibboleth login
• Login via your home institution
• Institution login

From 1 August 2009 it will not be accepted in place of an Athens password.

A small number of services do not support direct Raven logins but are routed through a secure proxy server which prompts users for their Raven IDs and passwords. The simplest access route to an ejournal or other electronic resource is through ejournals@cambridge and eresources@cambridge, which have up-to-date links.

Information about Raven, including how to obtain a Raven password, is available on the Computing Service web site.

A list of Frequently Asked Questions are also available; other questions and requests for support on Raven should be addressed to the University Library Raven helpdesk at lib-raven@lists.cam.ac.uk.

The above changes do not affect those who log into electronic resources remotely using a VPDN connection.

Document Scanning Service

From the beginning of July until the end of September, the Central Science Library (CSL), will be conducting a free trial of a new Document Scanning Service for current staff and students of the University. The service will be used for material held at the CSL that is not currently available electronically. This includes articles from journals and chapters from books.

We will scan on request and email out the document, as an A4-sized PDF, within a 24-hour period.

Users of the service should be aware that the CSL operates within the restrictions of the Copyright Act. This means that under UK law we will only be able to provide, for the purposes of private study or research for non-commercial purpose, the following:

a) one article from any one issue of a journal or periodical

b) one chapter or 5% of extracts from a published work.

To make use of this service please send the details via this form.

At the end of the trial we will review the service and look to assessing the long-term sustainability of the Document Scanning Service.

Using information on the move survey

A chance to win an Flip video camera, £30 in book vouchers or membership to the Arts Picturehouse worth £27.

Take part in a survey intended to establish how the majority of Cambridge University students and staff access, or would like to access, information away from your desk or laptop. The survey questions are primarily about how you use your mobile phone, smartphone or PDA to look up, use or interact with information. As mobile phone use has become increasingly common, more and more ways of using them to access or interact with information have developed. Newer models of mobile phones are more powerful than personal computers were a few years ago and often include much of the functionality of a pocket PC, such as a calendar, a camera, a notes function, and an internet browser.

All answers will be completely anonymous. If you choose to provide your email address to enter the prize draw, or if you wish to contribute further to the project, we will not associate it with your responses or retain it after the end of the project. The aggregated survey results, however, will be made publicly available and may be used to inform development of services for students and staff.

This research is being undertaken jointly at Cambridge University and The Open University as part of the Arcadia project. Staff and students at The Open University will be receiving the same survey. For more information about the project, please click on the link provided at the end of the survey.

To take the survey, please go to http://cli.gs/caminfosurvey. It should take 10 to 15 minutes to complete it. The cut-off date for submissions is 19 March 2009.