Month: July 2011

Important changes to your login details

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Your login details for some of our services will be changing from 1st August 2011.  The following resources will be affected:

What is my new username and password?
Your new username from 1st August 2011 will be your official university e-mail address.

Your password *will not change* and will be the password you currently use to login to your university e-mail.

How do I use my new Swansea University login with the Athens service?

Please visit http://www.swansea.ac.uk/lis/digitallibrary/athens/ for information about how to update your Athens service to use your new login.

What about saved searches and saved records?

If you require assistance with transferring personal data that you have saved after logging in to any of our services, please contact your ISS Subject team initially using contact information found at:  http://www.swansea.ac.uk/lis/helpandguides/subjectteams/

Searching for data?

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Try this new beta version search engine, Zanran,  which specifically searches for good quality data and statistics: http://www.zanran.com/.

This is what Zanran say about their search engine:

“Zanran helps you to find ‘semi-structured’ data on the web. This is the numerical data that people have presented as graphs and tables and charts. For example, the data could be a graph in a PDF report, or a table in an Excel spreadsheet, or a barchart shown as an image in an HTML page. This huge amount of information can be difficult to find using conventional search engines, which are focused primarily on finding text rather than graphs, tables and bar charts.  Put more simply: Zanran is Google for data.”

Remember there are also useful links to scholarly sources of data and statistics on the Swansea University Information Services & Systems website at

http://www.swansea.ac.uk/lis/helpandguides/subjectguides/statistics/

Are you a new member of staff in Business & Economics?

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This new guide published by JISC, the Higher Education Academy and by the University of Liverpool will be useful to new academic staff:

An insider’s guide to becoming a  Business Academic : Questions, answers and checklists for new Business Academics

http://research-archive.liv.ac.uk/3533/

 

MD

Summer Re-sits

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Pen and notebook

Image by Markus Rodder under Creative Commons Licence

Just a reminder for any students having to take re-sits this summer that we have a wide collection of resources available electronically, accessible using your Athens username and password. For example, to view our e-books by topic, click on any of the links below to display a list from the Library Catalogue:

Accounting E-Books

Business E-Books

Economics E-Books

Finance E-Books

Management E-Books

Marketing E-Books

If you are able to come into the library, we currently have many copies of core textbooks on the shelves. Our Summer opening hours are available here.

The Business & Economics library team are happy to help throughout the holidays – just drop us an email at buslib@swansea.ac.uk.

Top ten tools list 2011

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Every year during June, members of the e-learning team get together with a couple of other speakers from within the University to showcase the tools identified by staff as having been the most useful this year.  Sixty-Nine nominations were submitted and here are the top ten tools as suggested by Swansea University staff.

Number 10: Google Docs (-4 places from 2010).  Google docs is a free, online office suite consisting of word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database applications.  The beauty of Google docs is that it can be saved “in the cloud” and allows for collaboration.  Google Docs requires a google account.

Number 9: QR codes (new entry) With the advent of mobile technology, QR (Quick Response) Codes are becoming increasingly common in the media, in shops and around the home/workplace.

Number 8: Netvibes (new entry) This replaces iGoogle in the 2011 list.  This is largely to do with the fact that several staff are using the “public facing pages” to feature an aggregation of blogs, news and resources that are related to their subject.  iGoogle’s shortcoming is that it doesn’t allow for both public and private pages.

Number 7: Dropbox (new entry)  It has been around for a few years though has never featured in the top tools list.  It allows for remote storage, sharing and syncing of files over several computers (with an internet connection).  Users will need to create an account.

Number 6: Youtube There have been several instances of youtube being used in various formats across the university, particularly in Modern Foreign languages.  An exciting up and coming development at Swansea University is the creation of our own streaming server, this will be launched formally at the start of the next Academic Year.

Number 5: Blackboard Blackboard is the VLE or Virtual Learning Environment used in Swansea University.

Number 4: Delicious (-3 places from 2010)  Delicious is a social bookmarking tool, and allows you to create an acocunt whereby you can save your favourites (or bookmarks), tag them appropriately and share them with others.

Number 3: Firefox/Chrome.  These aren’t perceived as “tools” in their own right, but both browsers have plugins or add-ons what are pretty nifty tools.

Number 2: Blogs Example of some of the blogs mentioned in the survey were WordPress and Blogger.

Number 1: Twitter. This is a social networking and microblogging service which also comes with desktop/web widgets, so you don’t have to rely on the web pages to keep up to date with your feeds.

If you’d like further information on any of these tools please contact the elearning team based at the Library and Information Centre.