Friday, October 29, 2010

A Century of E-books...

We've passed the 100 mark in our e-book collection, all viewable from on or off-campus using your usual SPD login. You can see the full list by clicking the "SPD E-books" icon on our Catalogue.

Any users with questions about how to view or use them can contact our Information Desk either in person or by phone (8842170) or email. Any staff who wish to link to relevant e-books from within their Moodle page can contact Liam O'Dwyer for assistance.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

3rd-Years Are Getting ILLs

This year we have extended our InterLibrary Loans (ILLs) service to 3rd-year undergraduate students. Previously ILLs were available only to staff and postgraduate students.

We have widened the service in order to facilitate and assist 3rd-year students in their dissertation and research projects. The ILL service is a system whereby on your behalf we can borrow an item from another library on a temporary basis.

The terms of the service for 3rd-year students are as normal:
  • 3 ILLs free of charge
  • thereafter apply charges of €12 (book) or €10 (journal article)
  • items held in SPD Library cannot be requested
The ILL form is available for download on the Library website http://leabharlann.spd.dcu.ie/EnglishSite/Services/interlibraryloans.html and the completed and signed forms may be handed in at the Issue Desk or Information desk in the Library. If you have any questions please contact Interloan.Library@spd.dcu.ie

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Book Sale

The Library is holding a book sale next Tuesday and Wednesday, 2nd and 3rd of November, in the corridor outside the Library. Books will be available for a recession-friendly €2 and all proceeds will go to Barnardos.

Come along next week, give a book a friendly home and help a really worthy cause at the same time. It's a win-win!

Thursday, October 21, 2010

RIAN Research Portal Launched

RIAN (www.rian.ie), an open access portal for Irish research, was officially launched yesterday by the Tánaiste, Mary Coughlan.

RIAN allows federated searching of the Institutional Repositories of the 7 Irish Universities as well as that of Dublin Institute of Technology, making Irish research material freely accessible both here and internationally, thus increasing the research profiles of individual researchers and their institutions.

The site has been live since July of this year and is already showing extremely high usage rates. It provides enhanced searching and filtering on the contents of the repositories, which are also made available via other search engines such as Google Scholar.

RIAN is the end product of a 3-year project which included the completion of the individual University repositories within its remit. The project was equally funded by the Universities and the Government’s Strategic Innovation Fund which is administered by the Higher Education Authority. It was initiated and managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group. As RIAN develops it is intended to extend to other Irish research institutions.

October/November Opening Hours

The Library will be closed on the following days:

Monday, 25 Oct: Bank Holiday
Monday, 1st Nov: Church Holy Day
Friday, 5th Nov: Conferring
Saturday, 6th Nov: Conferring

For our full opening hours around these dates check our website.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Go See Us At The Moderns

Well not us, but our books!

We've let 6 of our most precious children (again, our books) go on holiday to live in the IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) for their wonderful new exhibition The Moderns. The books we have donated are rare first editions from our Dolmen Press Collection:

An Béal Bocht by Myles na gCopaleen;

Rough Field by John Montague;

Zone, Guillaume Apollinaire translated by Samuel Beckett;

Riders to the Sea
by J.M. Synge;

The Táin
by Thomas Kinsella;

Another September
by Thomas Kinsella.

Dolmen Press produced some of the most beautiful and most sought-after books in the world. The first edition of Kinsella's Táin features beautiful lithographic brush drawings by Louis le Brocquy which the artist called "shadows thrown by the text", while Riders to the Sea contains colour linocuts by Tate Adams.

The Irish Times have an article on the exhibition here while IMMA themselves describe it as
"the biggest and most ambitious exhibition to be staged by IMMA...a brilliantly diverse collection of visual arts, books, design, architecture, film and music, it traces the development of Modernism in Ireland from the 1900s to the 1970s"
The Moderns opens today, October 20th and runs through to the end of Spring 2011. Our contribution is displayed in Room 17B so go along and show our celebrity books a friendly face!

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Booker Booker On The Shelf...

"He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one…"
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobsen, winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, is now available for loan in the main lending section of the Library.

Notable as the first comic novel to win the prize, it was described by Andrew Motion, Chair of the judges as "very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize."

The other shortlisted titles for this year's prize are also available from the Library, including Room by Irish author Emma Donoghue. Check them out!


Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Maths Week Exhibition

To celebrate Maths Week we are currently displaying a variety of books, articles and posters relating to symmetry and other visual aspects of Mathematics at the entrance to the main library.

The collection is entitled Symmetry and Art and contains materials by and about people such as M.C. Escher, Hans Freudenthal and Hermann Weyl.

Many of the books have been donated to the Library by members of the Mathematics Department for the duration of the exhibition so please come up and have a look at them while you have the chance.

At different times during the day we are also displaying a related slideshow of symmetry-related art on our information screen.

Our thanks to Maurice O'Reilly, Head of Mathematics for his help and donations for the exhibition.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

2010/11 Library Guides Now Available

Our new Library Guides are now available at our Information Desk. We've squashed all the essential information about our Library and Information Service into a handy super-slim A5 guide.

Great for those starting out in Pat's - we will also be providing them at our Library Inductions. Also for those who've been here a while but need a refresher, it's got (almost) everything you wanted to know about us but were afraid to ask...

New Irish Press Online Archive

Thirty years of back issues of the Irish Press (which began in 1931 and ceased operating in 1995) are now available via the Irish Newspaper Archives database.

The coverage is from 1930 to1960, with the remaining 35 years due to be added by the end of the year.

The Irish Newspaper Archive can be accessed via the Databases A-Z on our website and like all our online resources is available off-campus also.

We are able to provide access to this resource thanks to the IReL initiative. If you have any questions or problems regarding usage of this online resource please contact our Information Desk - info.library@spd.dcu.ie/8842175.

New DCU Referencing Guide

DCU Library have produced an updated version of their guide to citing and referencing using the Harvard style. It is available to download as a pdf file for staff and students of SPD from the citing and referencing section of our website. The guide has been completely revised and updated by two of DCU Library's subject librarians Amanda Halpin and Lisa Callaghan. It is specifically aimed at those using the Harvard style of referencing so students should check first with their lecturers or supervisors regarding their preferred style of referencing.

We also provide access to Refworks, the web-based reference management tool which can help you manage your references and create the bibliographies you need for your assignments in a variety of styles. If you have any questions or problems regarding the use of Refworks please contact the Information Desk info.library@spd.dcu.ie/01-8842170.