ILS Matters

ScienceDirect will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance for approximately 12 hours during the period from 1:00PM GMT on Saturday, 23 January to 1:00AM GMT on Sunday, 24 January. Elsevier apologises for the inconvenience.

For those of you who haven’t come across Wordle before, give it a go. Great fun for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. Just provide a URL or a piece of text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

We’re not saying you should use it to try to pull out the important themes from a piece of academic writing… but you could do that.

This word cloud is from the RSS feed for this blog (http://ilsmatters.wordpress.com/feed/). Just look how available everything is in January at Peirson Library!

More good news for those of you studying hard: we are extending opening hours in Peirson Library, starting next week. Between 11th January and 22nd January (inclusive) the Peirson Building will be open until midnight.

In addition, here’s a reminder of the PC rooms available to you in Peirson and elsewhere on campus.

• In Peirson, PL 1002 (the Information Skills room) has 19 dual-boot iMacs, running OSX 10.5 (Leopard) and Windows XP Pro, for use during normal Library opening hours.
• The following rooms are available for students requiring subject specific software: EEG 023 has 22 PCs – available for Geography students. EE 1101 is available for Education students.

For access to the following rooms out-of-hours, please contact Security through main reception:

• In Edward Elgar Building, EEG 031 has 34 PCs and EEG 169 has 27 PCs. These rooms are available 24/7 for all students when not being used for teaching.

Good news for anyone needing to study over the Christmas break (so just about everyone then).

If you take out any Restricted Loan item any time after 5pm on Wednesday 23rd,  you don’t need to bring it back until Monday 4th January. That turns a 5-hour Restricted Loan item into a 10-day loan!

You must have been good boys and girls this year.

“internet searches are searching only 0.03% … of the [total web] pages available.”

Beckett, A. (Thursday 26th November 2009) The dark side of the internet. The Guardian. [Online] Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/26/dark-side-internet-freenet [Accessed 26th November 2009]

This article has been around for a couple of weeks now, but Andy Beckett’s article on The dark side of the internet is going to be relevant for a long time. And if you want to learn a bit more about the other 99.97% of the web (the legal bits of it anyway, perhaps deep web rather than dark web), you may just want to talk to your Academic Liaison Librarian.

This Sunday is one of our bimonthly scheduled systems maintenance days. All University ICT systems are ‘at risk’ between 8 am and 6 pm on Sunday while work is in progress, though this does not mean that all systems will be unavailable on that day.

Serious head on for this one. We’re currently having some problems with Resources Online, whereby catalogue searches are hanging for minutes at a time. If you’re having any problems, it might be worth speaking to the team at the Enquiries Point. They have some other ways in they could try.

It’s number one on our priority list, and should be sorted very soon.

Just a quickie, this one. We have a set of 12 pre-agreed maintenance days for our IT and Infrastructure teams to do a bit of trouble-shooting and preventative work on the equipment, and the first of these is just round the corner. So, on Sunday 18th October, we’ll be hard at work on student PCs across campus.

 The plan is for very little disruption, but do please be aware that this is planned in case you have anything important to do on Sunday. Me, I’m thinking roast beef and yorkshire puddings. Mmmmm…