The HardiBlog

We are delighted to announce that a three-year project on Retention and Writing at NUIG led by Dr Irina Ruppo at the Academic Writing Centre has been given funding  under the Student Project Fund scheme. Retention and Writing at NUIG adopts a two-pronged approach wherein research into writing and retention is combined with support for students over the summer months. This model was adopted for three weeks in the summer of 2018, and for six weeks in the summer of 2019, thanks to the support of the Student Services and from the Dean of Students respectively.  So far we have developed an approach to examine the connection between writing problems and retention issues, administered a survey to NUIG students, and analysed the data, while also providing summer writing support to postgraduate students and students preparing for repeat exams. At this point, we have the data to suggest a possible connection between writing problems and related to retention issues. The current p...

NUI Galway is to provide Ireland's first OER service and publishing platform for students and staff. The OER platform will create and promote open, free, and reusable OER learning materials. Led by the Library, with the Centre for Excellence in Learning & Teaching (CELT) and the Students' Union (SU). This project directly addresses one of the flagship goals of NUI Galway's strategy of Open NUI Galway to “ promote the use and production of Open Educational Resources ” . Create and publish your own OERs (due to launch in mid-2021) A pilot project to create NUI Galway OERs has been funded. OERs reduce costs and barriers for students while making learning easier and more accessible. Studies have found a direct link between OERs and higher test scores, lower failure rates, and lower drop-out rates. OERs also make course material more effective while promoting professional contributions of students and the academic community to teaching and learning in their field. ...

The Academic Writing Centre is coming back this summer. We will be doing all our work remotely, and we hope this will enable as many students as possible to access our services. We will open on 15 July and will remain open until 26 August. Whether you are working on repeat assignments, theses, or other projects, you are all welcome to avail of the following services: 1. Consultations over the email:.  Please send a quick email to awctutors@gmail.com . We will get back with a list of questions about your project. Answer as many of them as you can. Expect a detailed reply within 48 hours. This method allows us to target our advice to your writing needs without doing the work for you. 2. Phone/zoom consultations.  At the moment we can only offer one phone consultation every 2 days.  They are only available to students registered with the DSS. To avail of those, please email awctutors@gmail.com . Include the paper you would like to work on (for up to 40 minute...

Covid-19 has brought both challenges and opportunities to the delivery of reading list material.   We are delighted that the number of module leaders making use of the Reading List service has greatly increased and we already have reading lists for over 700 modules for the 2020/21 academic year.   We greatly appreciate all the academic staff who have engaged with the service, you are helping us to ensure your students will have stress-free and seamless access to their readings.   If you have yet to provide us with your Reading Lists for 20/21, you can find out how to do so on our Reading List Service page. The challenge facing us now are those books that are not available for sale as e-books with institution-wide access, or that are only available at exorbitant costs.   We would like to share some knowledge of this challenge, so that you, our academic colleagues, can understand why it may be necessary to consider recommending different books to your students...

 Tourist blogs -  1900s-1960-style As we are allowed to expand our horizons to travel anywhere in Ireland from 29 June, it is worth looking back at some of the tourist accounts and travel guides relating to Ireland published during the twentieth century. The first half of the century witnessed the zenith of the Irish railway network when the whole island was connected by rail. In 1906 a map was published to accompany the report of the Vice-regal Commission on Railways in Ireland . It is contained in the Commission’s full report which is available through the House of Commons Parliamentary papers database on the library website or the Enhanced Parliamentary Papers Ireland website. You can also access the map on Wikimedia Commons The Midland and Great Western Railway Company’s branch line to Clifden ran through our university campus. When you walk from the library towards Distillery road, you are walking on the railway! If you would like to read some of the guides t...

Medici.tv is a leading classical music channel, providing the largest on demand library of classical music. Medici.tv’s library features over 1,800 programmes ( 3,000 original works), including: concerts and archived historical concerts operas ballets documentaries, artist portraits and educational programs master classes Trial access to Medici.tv is available until 17 July via the library catalogue . Collection Development

A sample thesis from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global The Library now has access to  ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global  until June 30th. This is in addition to the normal bibliographic access we have to this resource (Abstract & Index). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global  is the most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses in the world with over 5 million entries. The full text PDF of more than 2.5 million of these titles are  now available, until  June 30th  as a generous response to the COVID-19 situation by ProQuest. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global  facilitates: post-graduates students to do carry out background research on proposed theses or dissertations  students, faculty, and other researchers to search for titles related to their scholarly interests instant access to high-quality, multidisciplinary research materials It includes works from nearly 100 countries and ...