Friends of Swinburne Library Online newsletter
Welcome to Issue 2
Welcome to the second issue of the Friends of Swinburne Library Online Newsletter. This issue highlights the Sarawak Campus collection of photographs in Swinburne Image Bank; brings you news from Swinburne Research Bank; reports on the award-winning Rover service and the recent indexing of the Library-hosted E-Journal of Applied Psychology; and updates on other digital and online news from Swinburne Library. We hope you enjoy reading this.
Swinburne Image Bank: Highlight on Sarawak Campus Images
Sarawak Campus Library staff contribute a variety of images from life around their campus to Swinburne Image Bank, enabling the University to build and enhance its archival collection of photographs from across all campuses. The Sarawak Campus images include events such as graduations, information days and cultural performances.
There are currently 150 Sarawak Campus images in Swinburne Image Bank and this number is increasing each year.
Here are some highlights of the Sarawak Campus collection:
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News From Swinburne Research Bank
Swinburne Research Bank has been growing substantially over the past 6 months, and it now contains over 16,000 records. The 16,000th paper, added in May this year, is a conference paper called Internet use and political attitudes: Australian and international findings from the World Internet Project, by Swinburne academics Denise Meredyth and Scott Ewing. The paper was presented at the Annual Conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research in Mexico last year and discusses how Australians’ perceptions and use of the internet as a tool for political engagement differs from that of other nationalities.
Journal articles and conference papers make up the majority of the records in Swinburne Research Bank (there are currently over 12,000), but these are by no means the only publications collected. Other media and publication types include radio broadcasts, commentaries, graphic novels, curated exhibitions and films. To view these, you can browse all publication types in Swinburne Research Bank.
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The number of full-text articles available through Swinburne Research Bank has also increased substantially so far this year. Of the 16,300 items available in Swinburne Research Bank: - 4140 (25%) are available with full text |
If you’re interested in more information on Swinburne Research Bank, you might like to read the team’s inaugural newsletter.
YouTube Videos: Malcolm Fraser Opening Swinburne Library
Swinburne Library currently has 54 videos available for viewing from its YouTube channel, swinvideos. The channel’s most popular video, ‘Malcolm Fraser opening Swinburne Library, February 1972’ has been viewed over 1,900 times since it was added to the site in 2008. This black and white video shows Malcolm Fraser at the podium opening the Swinburne Library, and runs for over 8 minutes. Most of the people viewing this video have found it through searching YouTube for ‘malcolm fraser’. Some people have also made use of the Comments feature over the past 5 months to comment on Malcolm Fraser’s accent!
E-Journal of Applied Psychology Now Indexed by PsycINFO
In May this year, PsycINFO, the abstracting and indexing service of the American Psychological Association, agreed to index the Swinburne Library-hosted E-Journal of Applied Psychology (e-JAP). The editors and Library staff are thrilled with this news as it has taken 12 months for the journal to be approved against the extensive list of criteria for appearing in PsycINFO. These include being ‘of a quality and scope of interest to an international audience’, having an ISSN, being peer-reviewed, and demonstrating ‘diversity of reviewers and authors’.
PsycINFO is the largest database in the social sciences and is an important discovery tool for many researchers. Being indexed in this database can increase citations and Swinburne expects it to enhance the prestige of the journal. PsycINFO is distributed worldwide and includes more than 2.8 million records dating back to the 1800s.
Swinburne Library has been using open source software, Open Journal Systems (OJS), to host the E-Journal of Applied Psychology since the journal’s inception in 2005.
Swinburne Library’s Award Winning Rover Service
Swinburne Library has won the 2009 Vice Chancellor’s award for Leadership and Excellence for its ‘Rover’ service. What began as a pilot program between the Library and Information Technology Services (ITS) in 2007 has continued and evolved into a popular service available to the Swinburne community. ‘Rovers’ are Library staff who move around the Library to assist library users with a wide range of information technology-related queries. They are easily identifiable in their bright red uniforms and are often consulted for assistance with accessing wireless on laptops, resolving printing problems, and assisting with simple IT enquiries.
To read more about the ‘Rover’ service, see Ben Conyer’s inCite article, Rovers: a new library role and a new way to market the profession.
Search the Library
In January, the Library replaced its old catalogue with a new way to search the Library. One of the major goals in this change was to make it easier for library users to find material they are interested in. Some of the ways in which the new search is better for users are:
- Relevance ranking shows the most useful resources first
- Search results can be refined by a number of categories, including author, date, and topic
- Searchers can save items of interest to 'My Library' for later use
- Better integration with the Library website means searchers can find information about Library services at any time
- when searchers make typographical errors or spelling mistakes, they are offered alternative search terms with a Google-like 'did you mean...?'
Searching the Library will continue to get easier as the Library includes new features and services.
‘How We Can Help’: a Video for New Students
The Library has created a video to inform new students about the services that the Library offers them.
In the video, a group of current Swinburne students talk about how the Library helps them with computer problems, locating materials on the shelves, online resources and access to a quiet place to study.
Swinburne Library Blog
The Swinburne Library Blog provides handy information about library-related news and developments. Recently it has featured posts on the new version of the Australian Creative Commons Licence, the history of the Swinburne Spoons for long-serving staff, changes to the look of Google search results and silence in the Library. This latter post ‘Silence in the Library?’ was prompted by recent discussions in the media about whether libraries are too loud, and has generated comments on the topic from a number of Library Blog readers.
You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of the Blog to keep you up to date.
Contact Us
If you have any comments or feedback about this newsletter,
please feel free to contact us via email at:
sbesselaar@swin.edu.au
If you missed the first issue of the Friends of Swinburne Library Online Newsletter, you can read it here.