156 new ebooks!

Good news! We have recently bought two ebook collections for our School of Management students. These titles come to us via Elgar Online, which is a database of research books, handbooks, companions, encyclopaedia, dictionaries and other academic material.  Swansea University students can now access the 2014 Economics & Finance collection of ebooks (99 titles) and the 2014 Business & Management collection (57 titles) from Elgar Online.

The available ebooks have all been added to our iFind Discover library catalogue, so you’ll see them cropping up in your results as you search for library resources as normal. If you’d like to view a list of all these new titles, just search for Elgar Online on iFind Discover and follow the links to the database homepage. From there, you’ll be able to choose Browse from the options along the top. Once the titles are listed, remember to choose the option for All accessible content under Refine by access to ensure you’re viewing the ebooks from the collections we’ve subscribed to.

We think these extra resources are going to be really useful, so do please have a look at them when you get a chance. If you have any questions or need any help, please contact the School of Management subject support team at buslib@swansea.ac.uk.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Going home for Christmas? Take the library with you!

Make sure you get the most out of your library over the Christmas break!

If you are heading home…

1. Make sure you have renewed all your library books or fines will accrue daily! You can access your library account online: https://ifind.swan.ac.uk/discover/MyResearch/Home. Login and go to “Items on Loan” to check what you have out. If you run into problems, call our Issue Desk on 01792 295178. You will not be able to renew books that are in demand and have been requested by other students so these will need to come back to the library before you leave (or be posted back).
2. Vacation loans start on Tuesday 9^th December 2014, the return date is Wednesday 7^th January 2015. Books renewed on or after the 9th December will have not have to be returned or renewed again until the 7th of January.
3. Remember you can access all our electronic content off-campus: follow the links in our library catalogue or iFind Research to access databases and journal articles. You can alsoset up Google Scholar to link into our paid-for content. Try our guide on troubleshooting problems with e-journals. We have had some problems recently with off-campus access to Proquest Business Collection but this should now be working – please do contact us if you run into difficulties so we are alerted to problems! The best email to use is library@Swansea.ac.uk.
4. We have a large collection of e-books which you can access from home, including some key business titles. Our e-books are on three publisher sites – we have a guide on how to make the most of each one.

If you are staying in Swansea…

• The library opening hours over the Christmas period can be found on our website (see the menu on the left for future dates). Please note that the library is completely closed on 25th & 26th December and 1st January.

For any Business / Economics queries, contact your library team onbuslib@swansea.ac.uk. Our information area on Blackboard has links to lots of useful resources including referencing guides.

Enjoy your break!

Our E-Book Collection

(This post is part of our 2014 Library Essentials series)

We have around 150,000 e-books in our library catalogue. If we can purchase a copy of a textbook in electronic format, we aim to do that but unfortunately the publishers do not always give us that option. They also sometimes price them high that we cannot afford to purchase – e-books often come with a limited number of “accesses” before you are required to make an additional purchase. The business model of academic publishers is frequently aggressive!

If we do have an e-book version, you will see the additional “Online” tab in the library catalogue:

(Click for larger image)

You will need to log in to read an e-book using your student (or staff) id and usual password.

We have three main e-book suppliers and each site looks and behaves slightly differently. All offer features to enhance your use of e-books: check out our E-Books Guide (PDF) to get the most out of our e-book collection and to learn the different ways you can download the books to read on your own device or computer.

Be aware that our “Dawsonera” e-books may have limited credits – in order to preserve credits, please don’t access them unless you really want to read them! Each access or download uses up a credit and we may not be able to purchase more when they run out.

If you have any questions about our e-books, let us know: buslib@swansea.ac.uk

E-Books for Business & Economics

If you missed the recent drop-in session on E-Books for Business and Economics, you can access the materials here:

Handout (PDF)

Presentation (PDF)

Our e-books come from three main suppliers (Dawsonera, EBSCO and ebrary) – each site looks and behaves slightly differently. We looked at the key features of each in order to get the most out of using our e-book collection. The handout has details of the different download or printing options that are available.

Top 10 Business & Economics e-books at SU

Image by quinn.anya on Flickr used under Creative Commons licence

We have over 80,000 e-book titles at Swansea University library – you can find them all in our library catalogue, iFind Discover, with direct links to access the full text of the book online. Particularly useful if all our print copies are out!

Based on usage figures for last year (2011-2012), the top Business & Economics titles were:

1. Operations Management
2. Mastering e-business
3. Consumer Behaviour
4. Microeconomics
5. Corporate Finance: Principles and Practice
6. A Guide to Game Theory
7. Managing Investment Portfolios
8. Business Database Systems
9. Management Accounting for Decision Makers
10. Applied Economics

To access our e-books you will need to have set the Athens cookie on your computer and then login with your Swansea University email address and password.

We recently acquired a massive collection with new supplier “ebrary” to add to our existing books which are mostly with Dawsonera and EBSCO Ebook collection. All these collections look and behave slightly differently – for example: EBSCO Ebooks cannot be downloaded; Dawsonera can be downloaded for 1-2 days, Ebrary allows a 14 day download. The link from the library catalogue shows which collection a particular book is in.

We are running a drop-in session on Friday 15th March at 1pm in Training Room 3 in the library if you want to find out more! Or contact us at buslib@swansea.ac.uk if you have any difficulties or want to give us your views on e-books.