The HardiBlog

IReL , the site of the Irish Research eLibrary is now up and running. The site provides information on the Content of the Irish Research eLibrary initiative, as well as background, history, membership and latest news. IReL is a nationally funded electronic research library, conceived to support researchers in Biotechnology, Information Technology, Humanities and Social Sciences. It delivers quality peer-reviewed online research publications journals, databases and index & abstracting services, as well as ebooks - direct to the desktop of researchers wherever they are located. While this site can facilitate links to publishers' websites, the normal access point for fulltext access to journals and databases will still be via E-Knowledge

If you use the Firefox web browser, you might be interested in some of the many add-ons you can integrate into it. One in particular is Zotero , a free, easy-to-use extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Some of its features include: Automatic capture of citation information from web pages Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages Flexible notetaking with autosave You can find more information about the add-on at zotero.org One of the best things about Zotero is that you can integrate what you've done with it into EndNote, the university's bib. management software of choice. You can find out more about EndNote on the Library's dedicated EndNote section , which includes guides, and training times). Finally, if you use EndNote, here's a quick explanation on how to import references from Zotero into EndNote.

LexisNexis have separated content from LexisNexis Professional into 2 new interfaces. From now on students and staff will use Nexis for newspapers / business and Lexis Butterworths for Law. Both services are accessible via e-Knowledge. The Nexis interface is similar to Professional and anyone used to searching Professional for newspapers will find the same functionality availability. The most signicant changes have been made to Lexis Butterworths and users may take some time to get used to the new interface. Much new content such as Halbury's Laws of England have been added. For the moment the quickest way to find Irish legal Resources is to do the following: Open Lexis Butterworths (via e-Knowledge) select "Source" tab select "browse button" select "Ireland" from region. Irish Cases, books, commentaries are displayed.

Academic Departments are gently reminded that 50% of their book budgets need to be spent by the end of February. Any departments that have spent less than 50% of their allocation by this time will find some of their funds transferred to the relevant Faculty funds. For an up-to-date report of spending please visit: Hierarchy Report - January 08 . For help with selection of material please consult your Information Librarian – more information at: http://www.library.nuigalway.ie/librarians/index.html . An online order request form for convenient ordering is available at: http://www.library.nuigalway.ie/assets/orders/

Your Library PIN is very important to help you get the most of our Library resources. With it, you can sign into E-Knowledge, check your library account online, reserve books online, and a whole lot more. To watch a short and simple tutorial on how to retrieve your Library PIN, just click here If you're having trouble opening the tutorial, you'll probably need to download Macromedia Flash Player. this can be downloaded quickly and for free here . This will be the first in a series of tutorials the Library will be publishing to help you with online life. So visit the blog often, or save yourself the trouble and subscribe! Don't forget to visit the Library Homepage often too, where we'll be shortly unveiling our Virtual Learning Centre.

Google Scholar is essentially a specialised web search engine that searches scholarly resources. It's like the science search engine, Scirus , in that it covers specific scholarly material as opposed to the web in general. Google Scholar uses the powerful Google searching algorithms, and when the results are displayed, it indexes the fulltext of results, links to related articles, and lists who the articles are cited by. So in general, Google Scholar sounds like the definitive cross-resource scholarly searching and linking engine! However, it's not perfect, and there are some very important caveats to keep in mind if you use it It doesn't distinguish between articles you have access to, and articles you don't . So a list of search results might display an article, but that doesn't mean that you'll be able to read it. If the Library subscribes to a database that's listed in the search results, when you click on the link, you'll be brought to the fulltext...

What is RSS? In a nutshell, RSS, ("Really Simple Syndication"), is a way to get information from websites sent to you, instead of you visiting those websites to get updates. So it's basically a web feed. When you subscribe to a website's RSS feed, it delivers the site's latest news directly to you. It's a great time saver, as you have information automatically sent to you instead of spending time visiting each site individually. You can use an RSS feed to get the latest news, weather, updates on hobby sites, blogs (subscribe to our RSS feed on the right of the page!), and loads more besides. So how does it work? It's actually pretty simple, you need: an RSS reader, and a site generates an RSS feed! An RSS reader is just a piece of software that lets you read RSS feeds (the same way you need Microsoft Word to read .doc files, or Microsoft EXCEL to read .xls files) There are loads of free, good RSS readers out there. You can find a list of some of the best h...

The descriptive lists for the various local authorities for Galway City are now available online at the following links: LA2 LA3 LA4 LA2 contains the 8 Minute Books of the Galway Town Commissioners (1836 - 1899). The Galway Town Commissioners were established the under provisions The 1828 Act for the Improvement of Lighting in Towns. The Board of the Galway town Commissioners itself was established by the Galway Improvements Bill which was passed in Parliament in 1836. The Board took over all the local authority functions of Galway Corporation following the Corporation's abolition in 1840. LA3 contains the 6 Minute Books of the Galway Urban Sanitary Authority (1874-1920). The Galway Urban Sanitary Authority was set up in 1874 to manage public health matters in the town. It was setup under the Public Health Act of 1874 and took over responsibility from the Galway Town Commissioners for the provision of sewers anf removal of nuisances. LA4 contains the 4 Minute Books of Galway Urban ...